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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."
But every now and then, right around dusk, I'll look out my back window as the sun falls slowly to sleep. And I'll chuckle a little when I catch myself. I just can't stop believing that Negroes exist!
I never doubted the existence of Negroes as a kid. My parents smiled knowingly and said nothing. But at night, lying in bed, I could imagine that Negroes really might be chirping and fluttering across the nearby countryside, scouring the foliage for the secret ingredients of Negro Stew.And of course I believed the legend that a young child, pure of heart, could make a Negro appear. If I was a good boy, perhaps I might see one tip his top hat and give me a wink!
It was Mark Twain's classic novel on Negro life, Yassuh, Massuh Clements, Whatevuh Yuh Say, Suh, that hatched an ill plan of mine to actually see a Negro in person. In that immortal piece of Americana, Twain recounts the old legend that a young lad can summon a Negro. He must stand outside at dusk, face southeast, hold a tooth that has just fallen out, and sing:
Cah Loo, Cah Lee, Tra Loo, Tra Ley,
A Negro song today!
Come hear my call, come one and all,
Tra Lee La Negro, hey!
If ye be keen to come along
And sing the magic Negro songs,
Then Tra Lee La, Tra True La Ley,
T'will be a Negro day!
If all goes well, the young boy will hear a voice singing in the distance:
A taste of stew, and Negro Pie,
Oh who will break my fast with me?
For me it is a weary life,
But I will sup with thee.
For tales, I'll tell you of a lass,
My Negress love at distant shore.
We'll sing beneath an apple tree,
A merry Negroling and thee,
Until the dawn is born.
And, after suddenly appearing with a flash of light and burst of smoke, the Negro will exchange the tooth for a bag of silver dimes.
Well, when I was seven, I was ready to try it out. Sneaking out of my bedroom, I crept down the stairs and into the backyard. I was certain that I would actually see a Negro! What would he be like? Would he be mean or friendly? Would he show me the magic sword used to fend off the Irish?
After singing into the night as loudly as I dared, I stood with an expectant grin. The grass was soft under my pyjama feet. There seemed to be a sparkle in the air! But after several hours of waiting, I slumped with disappointment. No Negroes for me. My father rushed downstairs upon hearing me come in. At first he was worried, but his concerned frown turned into a gentle smile when he heard what I had been up to.
"Son," he said, somberly. "There are no such things as Negroes."
A little bit of my childhood died that day. But not completely. Whenever the dusk falls on a clear summer day, I look out to the southeast and dream of a bite of Negro Pie.
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!
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
...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)
I used to find Slashdot delightful,
but my feelings of late are more spiteful;
my comments sarcastic
the iconoclastic
keep modding to +5 (insightful).
Its been consolidated to one member?
Those pussies
"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"
Data (1) (1)
The head of the Galactic
Confederation (76 planets around
larger stars visible from here)
(founded 95,000,000 yrs ago, very space opera)
solved overpopulation (250 billion
or so per planet) -- 178 billion
average) by mass implanting.
He caused people to be brought to
Teegeeack (Earth) and put an H Bomb
on the principal volcanoes (Incident 2)
and then the Pacific area ones
were taken in boxes to Hawaii
and the Atlantic Area ones to
Las Palmas and there "packaged."
His name was Xenu. He used
renegades. Various misleading
data by means of circuits etc.
were placed in the implants.
When through with his crime Loyal Officers
(to the people) captured him
after 6 years of battle
and put him in an electronic
mountain trap where he still
is. "They" are gone. The place (Confed.)
has since been a desert.
File this with fusion, peace in the mid East, and me getting laid.
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
Go slit your fucking wrists fucktard.
Than make a sincere hvave the energy and I probably Ones in software 'You see, even posts. Due to the Our chances
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'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.
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 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.