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:Cold Fusion?

[cjc25]

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 ;)

Absolute Zero

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:Absolute Zero

[hamster_nz]

Must be just you...

* When I need a hat on it's cold

* When my beer in the truck freezes overnight then it's really cold

* When the diesel in my truck freezes overnight then it's really cold.

* When my desktop maser works without any external cooling, then it's near absolute zero.

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.

Re:Absolute Zero

[Yvanhoe]

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.

Re:Absolute Zero

[Yvanhoe]

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...

Powered by...

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:I want diagrams, temperatures, power figures, e

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Cold Fusion?

[symbolset]

You may be destined for a long unpleasant online experience.

Re:Cold Fusion?

[drkim]

Your mom's basement has a window?

Well, it's 'technically' a poster of two girls standing on the beach... not a real window.

Re:room temperature maser is not novel

[bmo]

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