alt Hacker NewsNIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers
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I'm excited for new displays where instead of RGB primaries that can only show a triangular subset of possible colours, we have dynamic primaries that can combine to show almost any colour.
I don't know to much about photonics but if they ever figure out the boolean algebra and register storage it would be really cool. You have 1 photo cpu core but just use different wavelengths for different threads running in the core. I am sure its way more complex than that but articles like this make you dream about how much we don't know
Is there a single person here interested in photonic computing that wants to explain to the class if there's any "there" there?
The actual paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08092
> When it comes to information transfer and processing, light can do things that electricity can’t. Photons — particles of light — are far zippier than electrons at working their way through circuits.
Electrons themselves don't move at the speed of light, but information transfer (i.e. communication) via electrons does happen close to the speed of light.
A subtle, but important, distinction that's often misunderstood and means computational performance gains would probably come from bandwidth, not latency.
My first thought is this will be used as a weapon to bypass protections against specific wavelengths
That's most certainly good news (depending on the final cost) for ion trapping quantum computing - the wavelength of the laser they require to trap an ion depends on the molecule chosen, and most setups are expensive, finicky and difficult to calibrate, or sometimes messy if it's a dye laser.
The "shrinking" circle: I did as asked and clicked the image to see the animation. I saw no shrinking. My eyes did fatigue and I saw the border between the red and green become a blurred gradient.
What should I have experienced?
since the light range is so high, technically speaking as the technology improves does that mean we could end up sending petabytes a second over a single fiber optic core?
I wonder if this is a nuclear proliferation risk--could it be used for AVLIS/SILEX?
Can each device vary the color or is it fixed based on how it’s built? Seems the latter?
Cool, can I get a "proper" yellow diode laser from this? What's the efficiency look like?
Just read the article and didn't see anything about building an actual laser… what details the article has (and its scant) its seems they took a fluorescing layer and sandwiched with a color wheel and added the additional wiring and control circuitry… (Obviously more nuanced and interesting physics but still…) cool and practical, but not a diode and definitely not a laser… I could be wrong and would love to be!
… now, if that setup could be drawn out into a fiber laser as cladding with a wide spectrum neural amplifying core (if such a material exists) that could maybe be something idk
0.1nm please. It's x-ray lithography time!
Yes but can it do any color a mantis shrimp would like?
Very cool stuff. I regret wasting my life in software when I see other fields still doing interesting work.
can they do microwave?
if you do the exact right color you can make certain things melt very precisely.
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Everyone talking about magenta and brown, but you can see an illusory color right now even without lasers! https://dynomight.net/colors/ behold, some kind of hyper-turquoise