Discussion

Any Color You Like: NIST Scientists Create ‘Any Wavelength’ Lasers in Tiny Circuits for Light

staplung: What if I like magenta? Or brown?

jiveturkey: But can it produce magenta?

aftbit: Cool, can I get a "proper" yellow diode laser from this? What's the efficiency look like?

mapt: Is there a single person here interested in photonic computing that wants to explain to the class if there's any "there" there?

brcmthrowaway: There's a lot of people here with esoteric knowledge of lasers, because they're generally incredible devices (along with masers). Someone should be able to comment.I wish we had a large laser manufacturing ability in the West. I would say 95% of lasers of all kinds are manufactured in China.

analog8374: can they do microwave?if you do the exact right color you can make certain things melt very precisely.

dullcrisp: Can I interest you in indigo or violet? Or a nice orange?

zamadatix: Pedantry for pedantry, you're in luck as the title says they created 'any wavelength lasers' not 'any wavelength laser' so you can make any such combos you like rather than the fixed set now (if true) :p.

BigTTYGothGF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maser

dnnddidiej: Genuine q: how close can you get to magenta with the rainbow?

nine_k: What we call "magenta" is the sensation of both red and blue color-sensitive cells in the eye being excited at the same time. There's no single wavelength that produces this effect (unlike e.g. yellow). The closes you can get is violet, which looks faint to the eye.A rainbow gives you both red and blue; mute everything else, and you'll get magenta. That's what magenta pigments do when illuminated by white light (which is a rainbow scrambled).

topspin: There is there there...The substance is they've created a way to fabricate a device that can make the optical frequencies they wish. That is useful: it means a designer isn't limited to frequencies that are economic to generate with existing techniques, which is a constraint that lasers currently struggle with: low cost, compact, efficient laser sources only exist for a limited number of frequencies.

dnnddidiej: Magenta is the Doom of colour lasers by the look of it.

cheschire: Yes but can it do any color a mantis shrimp would like?https://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp

nine_k: Immediately:* You can pack many more different colors into fiber optic communication lines. Every color carries a few tens of GHz in modulation, but the carrier light is in hundreds of THz; there's a ton of bandwidth not used between readily available colors.* You can likely do interesting molecular chemistry by precisely adjusting laser light to the energy levels of particular bonds / electrons.* Maybe you can precisely target particular wavelengths / absorption bands for more efficient laser cutting and welding, if these adjustable lasers can be made high-power.

dado3212: I think it's more relevant for quantum computing. The ions we choose for ion trap quantum computers are in part due to what wavelengths are excitable by modified telecom lasers, because they're the wavelengths that are easiest to produce and where the most research/stability/miniaturization has been focused. If the laser wavelength is configurable to this degree then it no longer becomes a constraint, and maybe you can choose single ions with different characteristics.

2ndorderthought: Depends on the cost. We already have variable wavelength lasers. We have had them for years. They are currently expensive, large, and not the easiest things to control electronically.I have an application in mind for this technology outside of photonic computing. Again, it depends entirely on price, tunability, bandwidth of the profile, etc. My understanding of the photocomputing field is limited but I never thought the major issues were wavelength related? Maybe someone can educate me.If anyone wants to send me one of these I would be pumped.

compass_copium: Not very! This is on the "line of purples".Here's a nice visualization of color perception (there are more modern ones, but we used the 1931 color space when I was working in the field). The horseshoe shape on the outside is the single wavelength colors.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space

suzzer99: * Concert lasers just got a lot cooler.

SilentM68: Well, since I'm not that smart, I asked an AI (M5-ST-TOS) to think out loud for me. It said that, if true, possible applications could be:1. Portable Optical Diagnostics (Lab‑Grade Scanning in a Pocket Device) aka Star Trek Tricorder.2. Non‑Invasive Brain & Neural Imaging (Next‑Gen fNIRS / Optogenetics).3. Precision Photomedicine (Targeted Light‑Based Therapies).4. Medical‑Grade Wearables & Implantables.5. Ultra‑Precise Medical Navigation & Imaging Calibration.6. Drug Discovery & Molecular Research Tools.7. Telemedicine & Remote Diagnostics.That's just in the medical field :)

__MatrixMan__: I'll take one in gamma please.

Retro_Dev: A gamma wavelength handheld laser would be cool; "and on this petri dish, we see a dot of cells instantaneously develop cancer"

adzm: 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

junon: For those not seeing it or only seeing a little, stare at it for a while then shake your head (or your phone) just a bit.

jcims: Can each device vary the color or is it fixed based on how it’s built? Seems the latter?

ivanjermakov: Not every color has a corresponding wavelength, rather a combination of wavelengths.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_visionhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space

marzell: Also there are other variants and tricks around this for other colors as well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color

guzfip: Very cool stuff. I regret wasting my life in software when I see other fields still doing interesting work.

Tade0: The Mantis Shrimp most likely sees very much like us (or birds, snakes), it's just that its brain is too small to integrate signals from just three types of cones, so it evolved a whole rainbow of cones.

JumpCrisscross: Huh. Anywhere you'd suggest I can read more about this?

dyauspitr: Saying a wavelength doesn’t do it doesn’t make any sense. If you can perceive it visually, a wavelength is doing it.

analog8374: thanks, I'm familiar. But it doesn't answer my question.

nine_k: Two wavelengths do it; one does not suffice. It's like a perfect fifth can not one note.

Aboutplants: An application that came to mind is tunneling (through rock and earth). You could absolutely tune the wavelength to whatever material your drilling through absorbs best, to help ease and speed. Would need a good amount of energy but I could see that utilized in some fashion in the next 10-20 years

jagged-chisel: 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?

jcul: The whole idea of colour and light frequency is fascinating.These are just frequencies of light, but the subjective experience of them is so much more.And the whole thing of my perception of "red" or what I call "red" could be very different to someone else's subjective perception. But we would both call it red and associate it with the same thing, fire, love, heat, danger etc.

2ndorderthought: I believe you are right.

dyauspitr: The interference is a wavelength too. Maybe not pure but it is one. Afaik they cannot be interpreted as two separate wavelengths and then “brain combined” when the aperture (the retina) is so small.

himata4113: 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?

deepsun: Would I finally be able to see bright brown?

deepsun: State for longer. It starts shrinking only after a minute.

awesome_dude: But also - colours don't exist without a nameeg. Before Orange, there was only shades of yellow or reds

db48x: It’s like any other fundamental research: you don’t know how much it’s worth until people start using it to solve real problems. This is something that is literally impossible to guess ahead of time. The most abstract mathematical techniques could turn into a trillion–dollar industry (number theory begat RSA encryption which now underpins _everything_ we do).But I will say that precise control of laser wavelength is critical to today’s communication technologies. I doubt their new techniques will be useless.

QQ00: Hopefully the billions money in AI will find some of its to turn this into real life applications. AI inference would love some more faster more efficient communication.I mean, Photonic computing already got the attention of these big tech companies.