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Researchers Use Lasers For Cooling
MatthewVD writes "Infrared cameras on satellites and night vision goggles could soon use lasers to cool their components. According to the study published in Nature, researchers in Singapore were able to cool the semiconductor cadmium sulfide from 62 degrees fahrenheit to -9 degrees by focusing a green laser on it and making it fluoresce and lose energy as light. Since they require neither gas nor moving parts, they can be more compact, free from vibration and not prone to mechanical failure."
I seen some cool case mods with glowing lights, now they could actually serve a propose! Neat.
So, shining a green laser into some goggles: what can go wrong?
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Been saying lasers are cool for ages, but do they listen to me? Nooo...
How efficient is this process? Would it be useful as a general replacement for current refrigeration technology?
It would freeze the water around the shark.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
This has been used to cool rubidium to near 0K in labs for a while. Takes some work (the laser needs to be *perfect*), but I've seen the setup myself at a previous employ at a local University.
The primary purpose of Night Vision goggles is to see clearly in the dark in those times where you can't/won't use a torch. So, in times where you may not want to be seen yourself.
How is it helpful to have the goggles shine with green laser light to cool them off in this situation?
Why would you want your night vision goggles to suddenly start lighting up with green laser light as they are being used? Most situations where you use NV goggles you don't want to be seen yourself (otherwise, why not a flashlight?) so it seems to be counter-productive.
How is this news? Scientists have been doing this to make BECs FOR AGES.
The scientists used SI units all the way through in their paper (Kelvin for temperature), and they would have been laughed out of court and certainly not published in Nature if they'd done otherwise.
Why does Slashdot even accept a submission in Fahrenheit when the subject is science? Most nerds understand SI units, and most of the planet is metric. How about trying to be a bit educational for the few that don't? Quote both if you're trying to be helpful, with the SI units as primary for science reporting and imperial equivalents only in brackets.
The primary purpose of Night Vision goggles is to see clearly in the dark in those times where you can't/won't use a torch. So, in times where you may not want to be seen yourself. How is it helpful to have the goggles shine with green laser light to cool them off in this situation?
Presumably the system would be completely self contained. Neither the laser nor the fluorescing being visible. Maybe we can think of the fluorescing as a mechanism to conduct heat from the electronic components to the case of the NVG. Of course that would heat up the NVG case but perhaps it is not emitting in the iR anymore than the person's face underneath it. More info is needed.
In tech circles, english units are the Steampunk of measurements.
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But what cools the laser?
-- Cheers!
In Soviet Russia, laser puts in the cooler you!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I've been looking for new ways to keep my flux capacitor cool.
I'm not signing anything
Singapore is a tiny island nation, with a tiny population of 4 million citizens (the actually number of people living on that island is 5+ millions, but with close to 2 millions being non-citizens).
I guess congratulations are in order for that tiny nation for funding these type of advance research !
Perhaps t'is another indication of the shift from the West to the East,
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... you make the light sensor more efficient by making it fluoresce?
Um, right. Good luck with that.
-- Alastair
nt
What about friendly broccoli?
The novel Sundiver by David Brin did this; they used a powerful laser to suck heat out of the Sundiver craft within the atmosphere of the Sun.
liberare massarum ex ignorantia, clausa descendit molestie.
How does this compare with peltier cooling? Is there some obvious reason (e.g. no airflow) why peltier won't work in space?
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Would it be possible to cool CPU chip surfaces by coating them with this glowing material to achieve the same effect?
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Handy for things like uranium isotope separation, and also for creating things like Bosenovas. The problem is, that the process is very sensitive to the frequency of the laser. If these guys have found a way to reliably, inexpensively create the right frequency of light to cool anything...then that substance can act as a heat sink to cool other substance. This could open a whole exciting new era of science and technology. But I won't hold my breathe, the proof is in the pudding, etc.
We have our refrigerator laser, now all we need is a stasis generator, to "control the flow of tune and space through the body of the Sunship, so that the violent tossing of the chromosphere would seem a gentle rocking to those inside." And I'm sure we'll have that any day now.
Yup.
Any.
Day.
Now.
... so in order to increase night vision, we have laser making night-googles loose temperature via fluorescence, which is light-emission...
Wouldn't it be quicker to just light up the scene instead?
Finally they can keep their kills from rotting so they can eat them later.
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Why does Slashdot even accept a submission in Fahrenheit when the subject is science?
Because you can't do car analogies in SI units. It just doesn't work.
Metric is fine for car analogies. Contemporary cars need metric tools, even US domestics.
"from 62 degrees fahrenheit to -9 degrees"
Please do not use retarded units. Learn to SI. It's science after all.
Why did you fell that you have to dumb it down? This is not a yellow press trash site. Ok, ok, not supposed to be a yellow press trash site. So let's at least pretend, shall we?
He's being educational for those that use Celsius and Kelvin. Did you think of that?
I don't think any scientific journal is going to laugh at anyone for using any particular unit. Scientists don't work that way. Science is not less noteworthy or scientific simple because it is in other units. They surely would have converted the figures to Celsius or Kelvin for publishing though.
No further text
Trolling is a art!
Sorry about hijacking this thread, but nobody seems to have posted the temperatures in a proper scale yet, so here we go:
Now if only they could of made it from 62 degree fahrenheit to a more scientific unit!
Thought it read COOKING. Now that would be cool!!!
And before we get to "what could possibly go wrong", we've been using the domestic application of RADAR in our kitchens for decades. Apart from the usual faux pas - pets, sneakers, eggs - there's not been too many problems with that technology...
That's no moon its a.... Cooler
The government has been throwing money at foreign imported talent to do r+d here in Singapore, Mostly they're 2nd rate talent who can't make it to the U.S.
If you burn billions of dollars in a giant inferno, you're bound to find a diamond in the ashes...
That must be why the mother ship has all those lights. Cooling lasers. The overlords see in the heat spectrum (or not at all) and so never expected us to detect them. Blaart: It's like the huuuman is looking right at ussss. Pleaotard: Not possible, Overlord Blaartumus. We have the cooling lasers working overtime.
Careful on the temperature of that inferno.
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Please! Please! Use the metric system. Only a minority of slashdot readers can understand those barbaric imperial units.
"Laser cooling of a semiconductor by 40 kelvin."
Agreed, having worked with a lab that certifies products sold in the US (21 cfr) and internationally (60825-1 and -2), lasers have gotten more powerful and compact than most folks realize. Class 4 lasers are easily integrated into the handheld green pointers that most of us have seen. What isnt realized is that the 150mw pointers that will blind you like a thief in the night. I have posted blue 445nm and green 532nm lasers to youtube that I have made burning through objects in close proximity, remember these are handheld pointers. Its all about your collimation, and focus on the desired target. These things are dangerous, and used by kids in third world countries for fun. Oh, btw green lasers emit 3 distinct wavelengths, 808 (almost invisible, therby bypassing your blink aversion), 1064nm (same deal), and 532nm which happens to be the peak wavelength for the cones in your eyeball which appears very intense.
I've known more than a few USians who left and went to Singapore because the funding situation is a lot less hassle-- no more proposals to underfunded agencies with low hit rates for small pots of money. Singapore sets them up with a nice lab and stable funding so they can do the things they went into science for in the first place. It doesn't sound bad, but I wouldn't really want to live in Singapore.
We all know it:
They can cool something because:
Lasers are COOL!
Define 3rd world, imho the US is a third world country. Look at where all the real tech is being innovated instead of litigated. It ain't here.
Oh, btw green lasers emit 3 distinct wavelengths, 808 (almost invisible, therby bypassing your blink aversion), 1064nm (same deal), and 532nm which happens to be the peak wavelength for the cones in your eyeball which appears
This depends on the quality of your pointer. There should be an IR filter in there to remove the other frequencies, but it's best to assume there isn't, just like it's best to assume a gun is loaded.
Even ones with filters can have really crappy ones, which along with a crappy frequency doubler, can mean you still end up with more IR than green light. A coworker was once sorting through a cabinet of old laser power meters to see if they still worked an were accurate. The first said 5 mW for a laser pointer he had, and then he thought the next one was broken when it said 15-20 mW... then so did the third, and forth one. Turned out the first one wasn't sensitive to IR, while the rest were, more than tripling the power measured coming out of the laser pointer.
Worse, most of the cheap ones emit significantly more energy in the two IR wavelengths than the visible one. Makes em burn things better, especially your eyes.
Actually, in Soviet Russia, they put you in the cooler for even knowing what a laser is. The way they see it, if you know it exists, you might decide you want one, and that's contrary to the collective good, tovarich. Back to your beet field!
(U see what I did there? Commence rofling... okay, stop now.)
This brings a new concept to manufacturing and technology; the concept of "waste light", or luminescence that has no practical purpose in the apparatus and actually impedes proper functionality.
You know what that means, don't you?
Don't you?
It means we're going to have glowing gizmos, not because (like the status-quo) they were designed to emit light, but because the light is the by-product of its normal function.
[*boom*]