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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."
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!
Its been consolidated to one member?
"Wail, wail, wail. Evanescent Ladle Rat Rotten Hut", set disk wicket woof.
-- Alastair
Hey, that's a great idea. I sure know I could use an effervescent laser after downing a big smothered beef and bean burrito with extra beans. This'll be the best invention since, well, smothered beef and bean burritos!
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
...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?
. . .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?
Actually, I first read "evanescence" -- the only laser featuring Amy Lee.
Yea I read effervescent as well. For a moment I thought the article was about researchers who had managed to genetically engineer sharks to live in soda.
I hate printers.
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.
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
I guess the auditors are cheering!
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
A turtle. Turtles, all the way down, man.
What bothers me, though, isn't the lasers, it's that this is the second Roland story in less than 24 hours. That Roland must have some amazing oral skills.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
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."
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
Roland gets financially compensated for his spam. Always has...
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.