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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."
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).
Ah, but does that use a laser they bought off of eBay?
No? Then *yawn*.
I mean, just imagine what the British team can do with a laser they bought off of craigslist or backpage.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
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.
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.
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
You may be destined for a long unpleasant online experience.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Your mom's basement has a window?
Well, it's 'technically' a poster of two girls standing on the beach... not a real window.
One demanding citations of work would expect to know to look in the citations section.
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.
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BMO
I only see the term "maser" in popular accounts of science. In my experience the people who work on them call them "lasers", "free-electron lasers" (FELs), "microwave lasers", etc. And microwave lasers have been commonplace for decades in the form of FELs. What's new here is the "solid state" part.
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.
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.