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After 60 Years, a Room-Temperature Maser

Posted by Soulskill on from the cool-and-yet-not-cool dept.

gbrumfiel writes "Before there were lasers, there were masers: systems that amplified microwaves instead of light. Solid state masers are used in a variety of applications, including deep space communication, but they've never been as popular as lasers, in part because they have to be cooled to near absolute zero in order to work. Now a team of British physicists have built a room-temperature maser using some spare chemicals and a laser they bought off of eBay. The new device is 100 million times as powerful as existing masers and might revolutionize telecommunications."

4 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Cold Fusion? by cjc25 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Because you saw the words "room-temperature" and you missed the last sentence of the first paragraph where it says the findings were published in one of the most widely respected peer reviewed journals?

    Or just didn't read TFA ;)

  2. Re:I want diagrams, temperatures, power figures, e by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually, the link to the proper paper is at the bottom in the references part, with a good description of results. Here is a direct link: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v488/n7411/pdf/nature11339.pdf

  3. Re:Absolute Zero by Yvanhoe · · Score: 4, Informative

    Just to elaborate :

    - Liquid nitrogen boils at 77 K (â'196 ÂC; â'321 ÂF), it is very cheap and a hobbyist can get this easily.
    - Liquid helium boils at 3-4 K and is also produced industrially.
    If you have something that requires a low temperature but no lower than 77K, it is very easy : just dip it in liquid nitrogen.
    If you have something that requires 10K, it is "easy" also : put it into liquid helium.
    I think it is fair to say that "near absolute zero" is a sentence that supposes heavy cryogenic installations. 10 K is far easier than that.

    --
    The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
  4. Re:Absolute Zero by Yvanhoe · · Score: 4, Informative

    I wonder how many other scientific breakthroughs are just sitting behind paywalls waiting for anyone to conduct basic followup on a research paper.

    Here, fixed that for you. As a CS professional and biology hobbyist, I once decided to use my free time to get a specialization in gerontology genomics and to help open source projects in bioinformatics. I then discovered that 90% of the papers in the field are behind paywalls that even some universities can't access. I needed to read maybe 100-200 papers to have a good view of the field. At 25$ each, it made it expensive to volunteer freely for research projects...

    --
    The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.