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Japanese Inventor Develops Practical Violet Laser
Clay writes "Shuji Nakamura at Nichia Chemical Industries, the company that brought us the first blue Light Emitting Diode (LED) has now developed a short wave-length violet laser.
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the article. "
As every school kid knows, shorter wave length lasers will let
us squish bits tighter together.
We already have UV lasers (CO2 and some exomer) so this is on big deal for making chips.
For lightshow apps you can blend from a krypton.
For many scientific apps, you dont need a lot of power, so a dye laser will work fine.
It's a semiconductor.. Wow, it actually would be useful (for super-HD dvd or such)..
I should read before I post.
They mention a quadratic relation between wavelength and storage but don't mention what
the relative wavelengths are. Anybody know what is used in DVD now and what this new wavelength is?
There are lasers that emit in the near UV that use nitrogen. I got the impression that these new lasers have the advantage of being tiny solid state devices.
I should know. I've built both CO2 and free-air N2 lasers.
If they don't Open Source it, it's gonna be CRAP!
To hell with the scientific or practical applications, I just wanna see a pretty purple beam! :D
And I hope this is themeable too! Id hate
to be stuck with a laser thing without
being able to change its look
> Purple haze all in my brain
> Lately things just don't seem the same
> Actin' funny, but I don't know why
> 'Scuse me while I kiss the sky
Jimi had a dream about a purple death-ray.....
I had to read that headline twice. I was sure it said "violent" laser. Practical too? Bonus!
The pronounciations is really simple: Ni ( as in nip) chi (as in chip) a (as in tao).
When a journalistic hack cannot get even the simple stuff right I doubt he get the rest right either. And why on earth do journalists try to convey and propagate mistakes, that are not even essential to the issue???
For this who care: 'ni' and 'chi' and 'a' are 3 separate characters when written in kana (hiragana or katakana).
Purple pretty.....
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Bring in the Narn Bat Squad!
Anyways, could you make a multi-layer optical disk, which used both IR and purple lasers, giving you effectively two disks in one?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
There's at least one CO2 laser (pulse-only) which emits in the VUV (IIRC)--dielectric barrier discharge pumped.
But the point here is that we have a practical, cheap (?), small, reliable, continuous laser in the violet. Very, very nice.
I remember that holographic storage uses lasers to store "stuff" in little crystal-like thingees. Since halving the wavelength allows us to store four times the same amount of data on a flat surface, how much increase do you get from a tridimensional storage medium? ... I can imagine future MP3 players that play the music from small storage cubes attached to my keychain... :o)
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
Nobody else comes close in the game of squeezing photons out of semiconductors.
Might as well research those ultraviolet lasers.
Hell, why not an X-Ray laser?
An high density laserdisk with an SGML'd archive of just about everything. (or everything.slashdot.org :-) A disk player with voice recognition and enough AI to search through it. Maybe a jack coming out of the player to stick in a phone booth for anything *not* on the disk.
Nerd's dream come true.
Will a violet laser be able to restrict the movements of particles moreso than the lasers currently used?
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
This means more data could be packed into one fiber-optic line.
I don't know the details, but I know that violet is maybe 350-400 nm, while red is around 700-800 nm. I think that red lasers are currently used, so this would mean a factor of two (as the article suggested). But if anyone knows better than me, I'd love to be corrected.
--Artemisia
In the case of gallium nitride, there is a yellow luminescence that was a major problem for making lasers. One of the theorists in my research group was trying to figure out precisely what defect caused the luminescence (probably vacancies). Presumably this company figured out how to make GaN with very little of whatever defect caused the yellow luminescence.
Diode lasers with even shorter wavelengths would have to have even higher band gaps, and then they would have to be pure enough that there are no optically active impurity or defect states lying in the gap. That would be a major pain.
--Artemisia
who cares about practical? i want a purple laser pointer! nevermind green laser pointers are already big $$$...
The storage possibilites for this are amazing...
:-)
Imagine a pair of those TV glasses with a "virtual" 16x9 HiDef display built in, and a little belt pack that plays mini-disc size DVD's... I would take a LOT of plane trips.
Lasers are good...
Slarty
Hi... I'm Larry... the shivering chipmunk... brrrrr!... I'm cold... I need a sweater...
But how expensive is it to make?
Guess I'll put off my DVD purchase...
Seen in the laser doppler interferrometry lab when I was in school, on a small label under the aperture of one of the lasers:
"Do not look into laser with remaining eye."
Laugh while you can, monkey boy!
I remember back in the day everyone thought holograms were the future. Now I don't know to much about em...but what kinda future can they have with computers other than replacing monitors. And if you can store data with Holograms....how does that work?
:(
NaTaS
http://209.196.90.210 my normal doamin natas.startx.org is down right now
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BFD