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Thread: Cheap lasers in all colors of the rainbow? So says Scientific American...

  1. #1
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    Cool Cheap lasers in all colors of the rainbow? So says Scientific American...

    It's a brief article, short on details but long on promise. Still, it's worth watching I think.

    Sure would be cool if the technology scales...

    Adam

  2. #2
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    Mar 2006
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    I like it. It's well known that most of the real scintillating colour in nature is made not by pigments, but by small scale structures diffracting and refracting, so I've been waiting for something like this for a long time. Someone's made it work, so it really is only a matter of time now. Unlike current methods that rely too closely on specific chemistries, these structure-based forms will make similar wavelengths by many means, this being just one, which might go the distance, or be sidelined bya better one, but either way, the close control of structure size will be the way to go. It frees lasers from their current dependence on specific chemistry for a given wavelength. I think this is far more interesting that the supercontinuum fibre lasers, although I guess that depends on how you want to shape light spectra. The supercontinuua will be subtractive synthesis, but the nanocrystals will allow exotica like additive synthesis, FM even, and the holy grail, resynthesis, a possible true emulation of any colour gamut regardless of the bandwidths of its constituent parts. And all dynamically controlled too. Hopefully, anyway.

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