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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."
While this may be the worlds' first room-temperature solid-state maser, it certainly isn't the first room temperature maser. Standard hydrogen masers (the ones that help NIST tell what time it is) are certainly not cryogenic.
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
Just to nitpick a bit, 10 K (as the article mentions) is really quite easy to achieve with off-the-shelf cryogenic equipment, and not the "near absolute zero" as the summary sort of suggests (I usually reserve this for 1 K, but maybe this is just me).
Because you are a knee jerk moron who can't actual read the entire description, much less the article, before pounding your meat hooks into your key board in some vain attempt at a brow furrowing thought?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"Using spare chemicals, a laser bought on eBay and angst from a late-night argument, physicists have got the world's first room-temperature microwave laser working."
Getting this to work reliably is going to require a reliable source of angst. Any high school should do the trick.
no idea what the journals credibility is either.
You've never heard of Nature?
E pluribus unum
This is frikken huge news, if it pans out. I'm old enough to remember when news of the first MASERs came out. Before LASERs.
Just the applications alone in Atomic Spectroscopy, ECR technology, high power communications- do you realize just how sloppy the frequency spread of Klystrons and similar devices are? Accelerator Technology, space charge cooling,... the implications for Fusion research...
Super Wow.
If it pans out.
This is a thread I'll get my popcorn for.
Your mom's basement has a window?
This may drain all of the angst out of the entire school, altering youth forever.
... you could vaporize a man sized object from space...
i'd rather have a zat'nik'tel
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
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
Now this is my sort of science! I expect that this discovery has been made several times before with a predictable outcome; hence its "undiscovered" status.
You may be destined for a long unpleasant online experience.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Reading sure is hard isn't it? Maybe you should head back on over to Digg... Oops...
It started back in Team Fortress Classic
Your mom's basement has a window?
Well, it's 'technically' a poster of two girls standing on the beach... not a real window.
It's okay, we've all said stupid stuff online before and regretted it. I really wish slashdot had an option to moderate your own posts down to "-2: redacted".
Or I wish I just stopped putting my foot in my mouth. That might be better.
One demanding citations of work would expect to know to look in the citations section.
"most in the field gave up on masers and moved on to lasers, which use the same principles of physics, but work with optical light instead of microwaves."
what the hell? microwaves are still EM radiation. EM radiation is light. thus a maser is just a regular laser in a different wavelength, no more different from a green laser vs a red laser....which are also just different wavelengths of light.
The next step seems to be a portable power supply...
= Maser Gun! Nice.
But those aren't solid-state. This is.
That's why it's a breakthrough. Solid state laser diodes got us optical media, fiber optics, 3d scanners, etc, because they're not fragile, big, and expensive like gas lasers. Gas masers are big, expensive, and fragile and need specialized technicians to keep running. Solid state masers you can take out in the field. You can put them in a hand-held device. Plus it's cheap. Really cheap. I just looked up the cost of p-Terphenyl and it's $165 for 100 grams of scintillation grade. That's a lot of crystal, and the dopant is $64 for 100mg. While that's a lot more expensive than platinum, it's a dopant - you only need a tiny amount in a crystal, on the order of .05%. 100mg of dopant can tint 200g of p-Terphenyl.
Applications? It will revolutionize microwave comms and broadcast links. Microwave tower links are everywhere but the problem is there are so many and interference is a huge issue. A tower-to-tower maser link is not going to be as prone to spreading and causing interference and doesn't require the power of current microwave links. Broadcast and comms engineers are already salivating at the prospects. And that's just one application.
--
BMO
It sure is, especially on your blog. I love it! Matt for President!!! Oops...
Hah, that was funny wasn't it? If only I had your Maser like wit.
~S
You are ruining the credibility of the elderly there AC.
~S
That game taught me to not live near such a power plant.
You don't want to be near by when the satellite mis-aims it's beam...
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
It may be 100 Million times as strong as its predecessor, but in absolute terms it required 1.5 KILOWATTS of input power to generate 100 MICROWATTS of output power. Not the most efficient thing in the world - that's an input:output power ratio of 15 million:1 (nearly 72 dB).
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
It's not a death ray or an ice beam - that's all Johnny Snow.
Perhaps, but when the incoming microwave signal is measured in nanowatts or picowatts, a gain of 100 million is pretty damned awesome. Bulk electrical power is easy to come by; a stronger incoming signal is very hard to come by. Depending on the application, who cares if the efficiency of the equipment is lousy.
A better way to look at "efficiency" is to consider how much energy is required to transmit some unit of information across a certain distance. 1.5 kW electrical power is not actually all that much power for microwave transmission applications, especially if it means that the transmitter power can be turned down by, say, a factor of 10.
I should have quoted this part of the article: "When configured as an oscillator, the solid-state maser’s measured output power of around 10 decibel milliwatts is approximately 100 million times greater than that of an atomic hydrogen maser, which oscillates at a similar frequency (about 1.42 gigahertz)." [emphasis mine].
I was not referring to it's gain as an amplifier; rather it's rather meager output as a 1.42 GHz oscillator. For 1.5 kW in, I'd expect at least half that much power out to be considered useful at all (that's for a solid-state or tube oscillator).
Here's a tunable VCO that uses 50mW to generate 2.5 mW from 1.277 to 1.691 GHz. That's 20:1.
The only use this thing has as an oscillator over other means are possibly frequency stability and coherence, neither of which are major concerns with regard to microwave transmission applications.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Considering that he got that first try with a far from perfect crystal he cooked up in a hurry, it's reasonable to expect some rapid improvements now that we know it''s not a complete waste of time.
Yes, you can use liquid helium to cool it, and it's probably easier than running your own cryogenic cooling pumps. But unfortunately it's not cheap - it's about $10/liter, vs. less than $1/liter for liquid hydrogen or $0.10 for liquid nitrogen. And there's a limited supply of helium in the world, so it's likely to be getting more expensives. (Liquid H2 temperature is about 20K, so it's not quite enough for a maser that needs to be 10K.)
Room-temperature masers are much more practical. And they're a lot easier to attach to sharks.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I agree completely (that's why I said "Good start"), but the wild, rabid enthusiasm of other commenters need to take that into account. They obviously didn't RFTA, so they hear 'maser' and thought it meant 'death ray'.
PS - I think you may have made it onto the DEA's watch list with your phrase "crystal he cooked up in a hurry". :-)
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Don't try to scare people away by bringing up terms which you don't understand. A microwatt is a lot of power at these frequencies.
I definitely understand the terms and agree that -42dBm is a useful amount of power at 60GHz. Thanks for the ad hominem.
My point is that if you've got all that power and all that real estate to run such a large and terribly inefficient signal source, what does using it actually give you?
In any real-world comms application I can think of (outside the laboratory), spatial and temporal coherence are not needed and introduce more problems that they solve. The beamwidth is narrow but is still diffraction-limited; the same limit can easily be achieved with normal high gain antennas (at 30-70GHz, high gain antennas are tiny).
If for some reason you need temporal coherence, your only choices of modulation are by direct modulation of the pump laser; that is, mixing (heterodyning) the output of the maser with a modulating signal by conventional means (semiconductor mixer, for instance) would destroy the coherence. I suppose you could do the mixing in a non-linear waveguide setup, but that would be a lot of microwave plumbing. Similar results can be achieved using regular old polarized antennas without limiting your modulation choices.
In other words, using a maser for comms is a solution looking for a problem.
In your example, a 1 watt optical laser would be at best 45% efficient. So you're looking at about 2.2 Watts input for 63 uW out. A 20 GHz DRO followed by a doubler or tripler would give you significantly more output power per unit of input power, as well as be tunable and tiny. The DRO in the link consumes a maximum of 31.7 dBm of power and emits 13 dBm of RF. an IMPATT diode would be another good choice.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
What, so you are looking for someone to call you on it?
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