After 60 Years, a Room-Temperature Maser

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."

Comments

Re:Absolute Zero

[TubeSteak]

You know what's better than having to use off-the-shelf cryogenic equipment?
Not having to use it.

IMO, this is the real news:

He came across a decade-old publication by Japanese researchers suggesting that when the electrons in pentacene are excited by a laser, they configure such that the molecule could work as a maser, possibly even at room temperature.

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