Finally, a True Green Laser

dusty writes "Remember those green lasers from Star Wars? Turns out that faking green lasers has been easy for years, but making true green laser diodes has been the stuff of science fiction. Until recently, that is. Now researchers from Japan have created the world's first true green laser diode. Until now, only red and blue laser diodes were available, and now with the addition of green, new TVs and projectors that are more efficient can be produced. And if you were wondering how green lasers pointers are already produced, it is a hack that involved doubling the frequency of an infrared laser. The new true green laser diodes have much higher efficiency than the current 6%, leading many to expect big time laser display breakthroughs in the near future. Ars Technica has a well-written article on this breakthrough."

Comments

Robustness, too!

[Sockatume]

A laser diode is much more robust than a laser diode and the frequency-doubling package of nonlinear crystals.

Snow Crash

[Derek Pomery]

Sweet. Now we just need it to draw on your eyeball.
And not blind you.
" Down inside the computer are three lasers - a red one, a green one, and
a blue one. They are powerful enough to make a bright light but not powerful
enough to burn through the back of your eyeball and broil your brain, fry
your frontals, lase your lobes. As everyone learned in elementary school,
these three colors of light can be combined, with different intensities, to
produce any color that Hiro's eye is capable of seeing.
          In this way, a narrow beam of any color can be shot out of the innards
of the computer, up through that fisheye lens, in any direction. Through the
use of electronic mirrors inside the computer, this beam is made to sweep
back and forth across the lenses of Hiro's goggles, in much the same way as
the electron beam in a television paints the inner surface of the eponymous
Tube. The resulting image hangs in space in front of Hiro's view of Reality."

Re:Snow Crash

[Daniel Dvorkin]

my Nokia 810 and iphone kicks the crap out of any wearable I have had over the past 15 years in my personal research.

And your typical smartphone kicks the crap out of the typical desktop computer from a decade ago. Do you see any reason to think this trend (smaller + more powerful) won't continue?

Snow Crash tech is only useful for plugging in when you are a blob of goo at home never leaving your chair. The raging BS about logging in while riding his motorcycle will never exist as I could not even stand the speed and status info in my helmet when I used to race.

Fighter pilots have been using heads-up displays for almost half a century, and at this point, the view from inside a modern fighter cockpit looks more like a virtual world than it does like the real one. The same thing is happening in commercial aviation, and just starting to happen with driving and motorcycling. Maybe you didn't like your HUD, but I can almost guarantee you that future racers won't feel the same way. It's just a matter of what you're used to.

What Headline/Summary Nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

Firstly, I really don't see how the solid state lasers using frequency doubling are "fake" lasers.

Even so, outside the realm of small laser pointers, there are such a thing as gas lasers and they can produce a true green emission.

The possible breakthrough is the production of more efficient semiconductor lasers that emit in the green range, not the production of the first "True Green Laser".

Yeah, this is Slashdot...Whatever