Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Invent World's First Anti-Laser
Velcroman1 writes "Two scientists at Yale University have built the laser's first doppelganger: the anti-laser. While a conventional laser emits a constant beam of light in one direction, the anti-laser simply does the opposite. It takes that same steady light stream and interacts with it in such a way that it absorbs and cancels out the light. And scientists hope the strange creation could help the fight against cancer. A. Douglas Stone, one of the two researchers behind the project, said he came up with the idea for a 'nega-laser' when working with equations for a random laser with his partner in crime, Hui Cao. 'I figured, if we just somehow illuminated the cavity, and replaced the gain medium with something that tends to absorb light, we could essentially reverse the process,' Stone said. Oh, that makes sense."
Now it's up to the biologists to create anti-sharks
It shoots a coherent beam of darkness!
Support my political activism on Patreon.
...an anti-laser capable of emitting a beam of pure anti-anti-matter.
Now they'll create freaking anti-sharks to attach these to.
Since this absorbs light rather than reflects it, I think the correct response is or you could just use anything that is opaque (e.g. a brick wall, a thick piece of cardboard, your cat).
I'm shocked. I would've assumed it was priests, or maybe economists.
But you didn't RTFC from the diagram, "In the anti-laser, incoming light waves are trapped in a cavity where they bounce back and forth until they are eventually absorbed. Their energy is dissipated as heat."
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
The impression I get is that they have managed to achieve an ideal absorber for a specific frequency.
That's what a classic black body is, but there is nothing in the real world that behaves this way.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I think it's more complicated than that. You'd definitely need at least a tachyon burst.
That's "Darkness Amplification by Stimulated Absorbance of Radiation"
Two scientists at Yale University have built the laser's first doppelganger: the anti-laser.
I do not think this word means what you think it means.
I am pretty sure current light sensing technology is doing just great when it comes to that.
I on the other hand, wonder if it's possible to improve the device to work as an efficient energy "receptacle" / converter. Like a wireless power cable. You could then "beam" energy i.e. in space (where there is no atmosphere to kill all your photons) to your sattelite. One could also think about using fiberoptic cable instead of copper for energy transmission, but I don't see a real application for that (except maybe some exotic noise issues).
Yeah, the invention doesn't have many obvious applications. But it doesn't mean scientists & engineers will not come up with one at some point.
An anti-laser would emit light in every direction except for a tightly focused beam.
All they really needed to say was that it's the time-reversed counterpart of a laser. Calling it an "anti-laser" makes it sound like it shoots out a beam of darkness or something like that (which could be cool, but physically impossible).
Why this is neat is that, because it's the reverse of a laser, it'll absorb some frequencies almost perfectly while ignoring others. The reason why they said this would work for cancer, for instance, is that you could embed some of these dudes in the cancer (there's techniques for that, I have no idea how they work) and then bombard them with a laser frequency that normally passes harmlessly through humans. Areas without these reverse-lasers will be unaffected, but areas with them will get really hot, killing the cancer. We use similar techniques already (with I think gold, I'm not quite sure) in order to localize radiotherapy, but I believe that the radiation used in the current methods still kills a lot of normal cells on its own.
I hope a diamond-encrusted gold bust of my magnificently pale ass will help to fight cancer.
A bust of your ass?
bust
n.
1. A sculpture representing a person's head, shoulders, and upper chest.
What does your face look like?
Do you have someone busting your ass right now?
All they really needed to say was that it's the time-reversed counterpart of a laser. Calling it an "anti-laser" makes it sound like it shoots out a beam of darkness or something like that (which could be cool, but physically impossible).
Why this is neat is that, because it's the reverse of a laser, it'll absorb some frequencies almost perfectly while ignoring others. The reason why they said this would work for cancer, for instance, is that you could embed some of these dudes in the cancer (there's techniques for that, I have no idea how they work) and then bombard them with a laser frequency that normally passes harmlessly through humans. Areas without these reverse-lasers will be unaffected, but areas with them will get really hot, killing the cancer. We use similar techniques already (with I think gold, I'm not quite sure) in order to localize radiotherapy, but I believe that the radiation used in the current methods still kills a lot of normal cells on its own.
You win. Mods, please get the parent to +5 Informative. It's clearly the best post on the story.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
BBC article on the same subject talks only about using in optical computers.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12453893
I want a device that I can point to a screen and make the slides disappear
Why are we getting ours news from Fox? For every concrete nit-picky criticism I can make about the article (improper use of the word "doppelganger", the strangely "compressed" quotation at the end) there are some serious conceptual issues with the article as well. I'm not convinced the author understands half of what's going on. I've gotten the distant impression from the interviews that this is a device that takes in a laser light and dissipates the light into heat, but the article seems to be implying any number of things from an EMP-like device that cancels out lasers to a laser shield. There was no adequate explanation of how the device could be used for cancer treatment. Finally, and the one thing that gives the article that special Fox News touch, is the subtle but definitely present underlying tone of "This technology will be the death of us all, because science is really complicated, I don't understand it, and I don't like things I don't understand."
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
It pave the way for a somebody eles' problem field.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Why are we getting ours news from Fox?
Fox News reported something the mainstream media didn't.
/. and lots of other technews sites. Statistics is also science, so don't generalize.
You anti-Foxers have this infinite loop problem:
1) Fox News reports something no other source does;
2) Libs yell "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU FOX IS BIASED!" and remain ignorant of the story;
3) Rinse and repeat.
I can name numerous stories the MSM ignores, and only Fox reports, but you wouldn't want to hear about it because Fox reported it!
And your whole anti-science thing by Fox viewers is just BS generalization. Sure, there are some creationists out there who would naturally gravitate there. But I am intellectually curious enough to read
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
If these guys have come up with something that will scale up to megawatt powers, this could spell the end of overhead power lines. It could power anything line-of-sight, including satellites. It could also transmit solar power harvested from space to the earth. Laser light can be focused tightly onto a target, unlike microwaves or radio-based radiation. This could be very efficient...
Reflection is not absorption. A piece of high-gloss tin-foil doesn't let any light through either, but absorbs very little. A material that completely absorbed all the light hitting it would always look completely black - you wouldn't be able to discern any texture. This anti-laser would be able to admit a laser, without letting any light back out.
Guess what - absorbing light isn't particularly difficult.
Guess what, absorbing light perfectly is.
Dumbass.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
*DO* look at the anti-laser with the damaged eye???
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
What a great item to put in the pool of my BOFH responses ;-) Thanks.