Quantum-Cascade Polychromatic Lasers

eznihm writes: "This article describes a new laser, developed by Lucent and others, that emits a band of light and operates at room temperature. "The result: a beam of high intensity at every wavelength from 6 to 8 micrometers, in the so-called midinfrared range.""

Comments

High bandwidth lasers

[Yarn]

These aren't exactly new, but this is a new(ish) way of getting larger bandwidths. Before you have been more limited by the physical properties of your material, which meant you had to use interesting carcinogenic dyes, or expensive crystals to get broad stimulated emission cross sections.

I'd publish my course notes on the issue, but I'm not certain my prof would be too happy. I'll check with him when I see him Monday.

Lasers Make Poor Weapons!

[Myriad]

Of course, they don't mention the weapons potential.

Argh. It seems there is one of those unwritten Slashdot rules that dictates any story about lasers must be accompanied by posts about laser weapons... usually in the Death Ray variety. For the most part lasers make poor offensive weapons, at least in the Burning a Hole Through X variety.
(Thank you Alien54 for not suggesting such a thing)

I've posted this before but here it is again:
***************

It seems inevitable that whenever there is a story regarding lasers we get to see all sorts of silly posts about blasting people with laser.

Even antimissle lasers have a long way to go. Between power requirements, beam handling, divergence, and atmospheric interference, lasers do not make great destructive weapons.

However, they would be damned good for some nasty tricks like blinding the enemy army (or, unfortunately, civilians).

Take this scenario: a bomber/cargo style aircraft has been outfitted with a large infrared laser (similar things have been done). Fly said aircraft over the people you wish to 'zap'. Release some fireworks or other attention getting devices and when the crowd looks up turn on and start scanning the laser.

Since the laser is infrared nobody would know they are being exposed to blinding levels of light, nor would the blink/aversion reaction take place. By the time you noticed anything the permanent damage has been done. Scary huh?

Another scenario under serious consideration by police (at least here in Canada, I've participated in meetings on the subject) is the use of lasers against commercial aircraft. The idea isn't to shoot down the aircraft, but to scan at temporarily blind the pilot during final night approaches. The effect is like someone flashing a camera flash in your face when your in a dark room.

As the few moments prior to landing are the most critical, distracting and flash blinding the pilot could easily lead to the plane crashing.

Worse, new solid state lasers are available in the 3watt (plenty of power to cause permanent blindness) range and can be powered off a car with an inverter. Simply park at the end of a convenient runway at night, plug 'er in and away you go. Ok, so it's not quite that easy, but the concept is...

Doesn't that all just scare you a bit more than some silly death ray?

Note: after saying all that I want to point out that I do not support the insane regulations placed against the use of lasers in the United States by the CDRH. It's totally ridiculous and overzealous.

Re:Isn't this a contradiction?

[renoX]

For me the device that they build is a way to have multiple lasers in the same packaging, each with a slightly different wavelength.

Each of the individual emmiting layer is monochromatic and coherent, but the resulting beam isn't, you're right.

What would be interesting is to see a diagram which would give the intensity of the light for each wavelength.

I suspect that it isn't totally flat, but more something like this:
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