Liquid Crystals and Lasers

Wan2Be writes "A new kind of glass pane that quickly switches from transparent to diffracting and back again. The change is triggered by applying an electric field, so the pane could easily be controlled by the electric signals of a computer, offering a powerful new way to steer beams of light."

Comments

Too slow for communications

[hbackert]

LCs are very slow compared to what is nowadays the speed bits traveling along a glass fibre. I cannot see a useful way of using it directly to redirect or modulate laser light. Maybe indirectly (like in getting rid of reflections), but this technology is still slow compared to what you can do with real crystals. Those are unfortunately very delicate objects (humidity is bad, bad, bad) and pretty expensive and you cannot make large ones (but you do not need to as laser light is usually small area-wise).

So unless someone shows me a useable way to use this technology, I will put it in the box Interresting technology with no current use with Internet attached to it to make it seem more interresting than it is.

Re:I hate to break it to you...

[Smidge204]

Ah, but that's just turning opaque. This stuff doesn't turn opaque, it refracts. This allows for not just blocking the light but reaiming/controlling it as well.

Very similar concept, almost identical process, but quite a difference overall.

If you bother to RTFA, it says:

"The big difference between what we do and what has been done before is that older-style glass panes contain a random distribution of drops and drop sizes ... without any order in the drop size and spacing, these older liquid crystal systems simply scatter light in all directions ... In our case, ... we're able to steer light in specific directions"
=Smidge=

Could be useful for holographic storage

[Krellan]

Something that can aim a beam of light without needing a moving part could be very useful for holographic storage.

I hope this development can help with improving holographic storage. Someday, the hard drive will reach its limit, and people will grow tired of the noise and reliability problems....

Weird Science

[DerekLyons]

A quote from the article;

Link and colleagues aren't sure what they're going to find when they shine light through several stacked-up layers of these ordered droplets ... that's what's so exciting about doing it! It might split the light up into a rainbow, like a prism, or it might affect the light in a totally unexpected way.

This verges awfully close to being junk science. If you don't have some expectations to compare results to, or some theory of what the results are likely to be, it's awful hard to come up with valid results. Having something other than your expectations occur is OK, as is having your theory be wrong. That's how science advances, by figuring out how and why you were wrong. Bad science happens when the opposite occurs, when you handwave away results that don't meet your theory, or rig results and experiments, or when you assume something you don't understand is something it isn't. (Pons and Fliechmann made all of these mistakes and more.)