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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!
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Now they'll create freaking anti-sharks to attach these to.
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.
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.
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
The article is absolute shit, but if you ignore everything the journalist wrote and just read what the physicist said you can get an idea of how this works.
Basically, it's the reverse of a laser; the physicist meant "anti-laser" as in "anti-matter" (because if you reverse the flow of time, anti-matter looks like regular matter).
Normal lasers take power in and emit light at a specific frequency; this thing takes light in at a specific frequency and emits power. In other words, if you take a video of a laser and play it backwards, that's this thing.
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...
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!