Slashdot Mirror
Evanescent Lasers to Speed Up Data Transmission
Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) have built the world's first mode-locked silicon evanescent laser. But what is an 'evanescent' laser? It is a step toward 'combining lasers and other key optical components with the existing electronic capabilities in silicon.' In other words, this research work will provide a way to integrate optical and electronic functions on a single chip. As these evanescent lasers can produce stable short pulses of laser light, they will be useful for many optical applications, such as high-speed data transmission or highly accurate optical clocks."
Or did I not read "effervescent" on first glance? Just think, and Alka-Seltzer powered laser! Technology has come a long way... medicine for today's grandparents is tomorrow's high-tech CD-ROM.
evanescent laser? Does it imbue people with emo powers?
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
of how they can see into that annoying womans' eyes like open doors.
With freakin' lasers.
Also, cue the shark comments!
...but can they run linux?
Okay, probably not (yet). But I'm actually serious about that. Aside from the awesomeness that would be seeing tux on the boot screen of a photonic device, there's the sheer awesomeness that is just running a computer on (mostly) lasers instead of electricity. Even if it's still a long ways off.
And lets not forget how much power it could theoretically save, what with not having to deal with resistance (not that light doesn't have its own problems, ie refraction and diffraction, both big deals when working on small scales).
Modern lasers are crap. Now that AC/DC laser, that's the shit that rocks!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Its been consolidated to one member?
"Wail, wail, wail. Evanescent Ladle Rat Rotten Hut", set disk wicket woof.
-- Alastair
...welcome our heaven-sent lasers.
And you will, too, if you know what's good for you.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
For some reason, "For Those About To Rock... LASE!" didn't have the right "ring" to it.
Karnal
. . .and I'm not helping: I won a spelling bee by spelling "evanescent" correctly in seventh or eighth grade. I didn't know what it meant 'til later, but I figured out how to spell it.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Students at UC Santa Barbara actually did something academic! Will wonders never cease?
For those about to undergo population inversion... We salute you!
I remember reading some of the patents they got for this a few months ago. I'm pretty sure we've talked about this before, too. That's not to say I'm any less excited- when we start to see this technology applied to inter-core busses, we'll see latency drop low enough to integrate a bucketload of cores on a single die.
We at slashdot are scientists, specialists and kernel hackers. Your FUD will be found out.
and here is the site for their research: http://techresearch.intel.com/articles/Tera-Scale/ 1419.htm
We at slashdot are scientists, specialists and kernel hackers. Your FUD will be found out.
Evanescent lasers - Goths with Fricken Laser beams atached to their heads? Or lasers which cause the targets to dress in black and mope around the place...
"They looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined"
The least you could do would be to attribute this to http://www.xkcd.com/
Today's lucky number is: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Wait, lasers coming from Amy Lee can speed up data transmission?
Does this mean that my files are going to be sung to me?
I guess the auditors are cheering!
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
Have you considered a career in motivational speaking?
According to TFA, the stimulated emission of light actually takes place in an indium phosphide (InP) laser diode. The laser diode is bonded to a silicon waveguide, which acts like a miniature optical fiber to guide the laser light around the chip. The "evanescence" is because the laser light is evanescently coupled from the laser diode into the waveguide. A proper description of evanescent coupling requires a pretty sophisticated understanding of electromagnetism, but the short version is that if you shine a laser beam parallel and adjacent (within a few microns) of a waveguide or optical fiber, some of the laser light will hop over and start propagating down the waveguide or fiber. In particular, by placing the actual laser parallel to and near a carefully-designed waveguide, you can have almost all of the laser light emitted into the waveguide, even though the constituent atoms of the waveguide are not emitting any light at all! For this reason, I think the name "silicon evanescent laser" is misleading since the silicon isn't emitting any light, and Roland Piquepaille's description of evanescent lasers is just flat out wrong. Getting silicon to emit light remains an extremely difficult task, and as far I know, no one has succeeded yet in getting silicon to convert electricity directly into laser light.
7 3. However, that paper doesn't really define the term "evanescent laser" anywhere, so I had to go back to one of the research group's earlier papers to find a decent description of an evanescent laser and understand the physics of the device.
If anyone wants to read the Optics Express paper referenced in TFA, it's available online at http://www.opticsexpress.org/abstract.cfm?id=1409
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
Until we decide to just get it over with and switch to a direct-bandgap semiconductor. Probably as soon as they figure out how to make a decent P-type fet on GaAs...
I would mod you down but I don't see a "-1, makes no sense" option. However, since there is the word "energy" in your post you could be on topic, so... umm, I guess I agree with you, especially on the software part.
I have a cunning plan to achieve all three of these goals in one fell swoop. All I will need, is a toothpick, some weapons grade plutonium, and roughly 5 billion billion billion USD.
which is totally what she said
We need a new negative mod category, "stupidly contrived use of a meme that was never funny to begin with".
I'm picturing Amy Lee with a frickin' laser on her forehead.
I'm confused.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
"That Roland must have some amazing oral skills
Now the question is who did he have to suck to get two articles on the front page so quickly.
CmdrTaco?
CowboyNeal?
Now that would make for an interesting poll.
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
I'm pretty sure that Malda has a vagina and not a penis, so it would be licking and not sucking in his case. How do you think he got the nickname "CmdrTaco"?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Or more to the point, this particular one http://www.xkcd.com/301/
Stop it. Just stop it. It's not funny. It only has a remote chance of being funny if you do something clever with it. Which you didn't. Remotely. So if you can't be funny nor insightful, then just read the article and keep your finger off the submit button.
Everybody keeps reading the word Evanescent as something else. Hopefully this tech will be used to make better contact lenses.
Neil is that you? Yeah yeah, it's me... Neil...
Anyone can stick monitors together with black seams between. This display is useless. There are companies out there doing this with seamless blending between projectors etc. UCSD should be embarrassed by this and the claims made.
I was wondering what this "evanescent laser" bit was about. That article clarifies it.
Light confined to a waveguide by total internal reflection actually penetrates about a third of a wavelength into the space around it. (Essentially "sampling" the space to "find out" that the refractive index is too low for it to fly away. B-) ) A number of things can be done with this effect (such as measuring the refractive index of opaque substances like ketchup).
In this case what they've done is build an optic waveguide in silicion (by etching it and perhaps then oxidizing it into glass) and bonded to it an LED with the active region over the waveguide.
- The evanescent wave penetrates into the region where the diode amplifies light, which provides the gain, pumping up the light in the waveguide.
- The waveguide provides the resonant cavity for the laser, as well as all the optical plumbing.
- The waveguide (and all associated optical plumbing) can be easily and accurately constructed using integrated circuit etching techniques.
- There is no critical alignment between the diode and the waveguide. Just get it within a range of positions that put an active region on top of the waveguide for about the correct length in the correct segment.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I think you mean cold fusion, don't you? Fusion of hydrogen is pretty well established. Well, for that matter, usable terrestrial power plants using fusion seem to be in this file for now, too. But in stars, we're pretty sure it works.
I didn't like it when he was submitting stories that only contained a link to his (ad-supported) blog, but all his recent articles have had links to the original source as well, and this one didn't even link to his blog at all. In addition slashdot added the no-follow tag to the submitter link (the one on his name).
So, he isn't getting ad-revenue, or even a search engine advantage from this article and he submits interesting stories. What's the problem? How is that any different from any other slashdot submitter?
it's still no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.
and none of it matters now that Slashdot has decided to hate Roland.
Slashdot is turning into 4chan. Never forgive, never forget, blah, blah, blah, suck my cock you fucking loli addicts.