7 ms·
NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers
- mapt 7mo agoIs there a single person here interested in photonic computing that wants to explain to the class if there's any "there" there?
- brcmthrowaway 7mo agoThere'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.
- db48x 7mo agoIt’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 7mo agoHopefully 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.
- topspin 7mo agoThere 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 (the kind that fit on a chip, and are fabricated by cost effective processes,) only exist for a limited number of frequencies. The story is typical tech journalism pabulum, but the underlying paper does discuss efficiency. It's about what you'd expect: 35 mW -> 6 mW @ 485 nm, for example. An obvious use case is multimode fiber communication: perhaps this makes it possible to use more frequencies for greater bandwidth and/or make the devices cheaper/smaller/more efficient. But there are other, more exotic things one might do when some optical frequency that was previously uneconomic becomes feasible to use at scale.
- criticalfault 7mo agoI wonder if this could also work for (e)uv
- jonplackett 7mo agoI wondered this too - why are you being downvoted for asking? All the difficulty to create that laser it seems fair enough to ask!
- jmusall 7mo agoProbably not because EUV gets absorbed incredibly quickly by anything other than vacuum. This is why it is created in low density gas, thin liquid or solid samples (high harmonic generation) or electron clouds (free electron laser).
- 2ndorderthought 7mo agoDepends 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.
- dado3212 7mo agoI 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.
- nine_k 7mo agoImmediately: * 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.
- suzzer99 7mo ago* Concert lasers just got a lot cooler.
- inetknght 7mo agoConcert tickets will still remain very hot though.
- firtoz 7mo agoEven with the latest updates? > Jury Finds Live Nation Acts as a Monopoly in a Victory for States In a verdict that could have far-reaching consequences in the music industry, the live colossus that includes Ticketmaster was found to have violated antitrust laws. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/arts/music/live-nation-antitrust-trial-verdict-monopoly.html?unlocked_article_code=1.cFA.CBSL.KeDGgmPu-G7F&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/arts/music/live-nation-an...
- summa_tech 7mo agoFiber has fairly narrow windows in which it is as transparent as it needs to be to go long distance. We're already pretty good at filling these windows with conventional semiconductor lasers. What this is actually interesting for is being able to access arbitrary atomic transitions, many of which are outside the range of conventional semiconductors (too short, usually - there's a big hole between green and red for semiconductors). That's why they talk about quantum stuff.
- SilentM68 7mo ago[flagged]
- Lerc 7mo agoNot an expert in the field but it seems to me the key points are. Generating any wavelength. (this article) Accurately measuring wavelength. (otherwise there's no information benefit to arbitrary wavelength generation) Wavelength insensitive holographic gates. (If they work on that frequency, and in a way that does not change the frequency) I don't know what properties such devices currently have Assuming all of those, your ability to compute increases to your ability to distinguish wavelengths. You could theoretically calculate much more in a way you could never detect, but then you get into some really interesting tree falling in a forest issues.
- morphle 7mo agoThe short answer if there is any "there" there for photonic computing is no, maybe. You need to understand quantum physics[3,2]. For example, photonic computing, photonic logic does not have a switch equivalent as semiconducting (CMOS transistor) or superconducting (Josephson Junction JJ) but we have a photonic Mach Zener interferometer (MZI) and a photon detector. Photonics and superconducting electronics is always going to be much larger in size (and therefore more expensive) than semiconductors build from few atoms. In quantum physics photonics we have advantages like quantum impedance, you can replace wires with photon transmitters and photodetectors and thus switch with only a few photons instead of large numbers of electrons. With photonics you can have billions of cheap low power data channels instead of high power wire bundles. But MZI as JJ will probably always be a few orders of magnitude larger than transistors so switching is not going to be better, but interferometry is. Shorter answer still: just low power communications and information processing yes, computing no. Bulk CMOS manufacturing is still cheaper than all the alternatives we have discovered or invented, until we learn to manufacture atom by atom or compute with single photons or electrons (also dependent on molecule by molecule self-assembly), we will stay with CMOS and Moore's law. Just listen to David B. Millers[1] lectures [2], his lectures are a shortcut to reading all his papers[2] that explain it all, especially [3]. Email me, I'll give you a private lecture. Your question's anwer is/was a summary of our whole lives research [4]: [1] https://appliedphysics.stanford.edu/profile/35 https://appliedphysics.stanford.edu/profile/35 [2] https://www.youtube.com/@davidmillerscience https://www.youtube.com/@davidmillerscience [3] Attojoule Optoelectronics for Low-Energy Information Processing and Communication https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=7805240 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=7805240 [4] Wafer Scale Integration Free Space Optics Computing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbqKClBwFwI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbqKClBwFwI
- staplung 7mo agoWhat if I like magenta? Or brown?
- zamadatix 7mo agoPedantry 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.
- dullcrisp 7mo agoCan I interest you in indigo or violet? Or a nice orange?
- dnnddidiej 7mo agoGenuine q: how close can you get to magenta with the rainbow?
- nine_k 7mo agoWhat 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).
- dyauspitr 7mo agoSaying a wavelength doesn’t do it doesn’t make any sense. If you can perceive it visually, a wavelength is doing it.
- redsocksfan45 7mo ago[dead]
- aftbit 7mo agoCool, can I get a "proper" yellow diode laser from this? What's the efficiency look like?
- jiveturkey 7mo agoBut can it produce magenta?
- dnnddidiej 7mo agoMagenta is the Doom of colour lasers by the look of it.
- ivanjermakov 7mo agoNot every color has a corresponding wavelength, rather a combination of wavelengths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space
- analog8374 7mo agocan they do microwave? if you do the exact right color you can make certain things melt very precisely.
- BigTTYGothGF 7mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maser
- analog8374 7mo agothanks, I'm familiar. But it doesn't answer my question.
- Aboutplants 7mo agoAn 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
- NitpickLawyer 7mo agoI remember seeing a yt video about this tech being already trialed (w/ regular lasers) for geothermal. They use lasers to "vaporise" rock, in the hopes of digging much more efficiently.
- analog8374 7mo agoI think that if you can hit the right frequency, the resonant frequency for wiggling the water molecule or whatever, it can cost less energy. So like if you can get just the right frequency you could cause a skin protein molecule to fall apart, which might be nicer than scalpels. Maybe you could weld it too. A "protoplaser" like in startrek.
- cheschire 7mo agoYes but can it do any color a mantis shrimp would like? https://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp https://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp
- Tade0 7mo agoThe 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 7mo agoHuh. Anywhere you'd suggest I can read more about this?
- Tade0 7mo agohttps://www.montereybayaquarium.org/stories/meet-the-mantis-shrimp#:~:text=They%20do%20have%20up%20to,among%20colors%20is%20surprisingly%20low https://www.montereybayaquarium.org/stories/meet-the-mantis-...
- skoocda 7mo agoThis misses one of the best mantis shrimp facts. One of its receptors only detects circularly polarized light But the only thing we know of, in the entire natural world, that emits circularly polarized light... is the reflection off the shell of the mantis shrimp.
- adzm 7mo agoEveryone talking about magenta and brown, but you can see an illusory color right now even without lasers! https://dynomight.net/colors/ https://dynomight.net/colors/ behold, some kind of hyper-turquoise
- junon 7mo agoFor 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.
- marzell 7mo agoAlso there are other variants and tricks around this for other colors as well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color
- jcul 7mo agoThe 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.
- awesome_dude 7mo agoBut also - colours don't exist without a name eg. Before Orange, there was only shades of yellow or reds
- jjk166 7mo agoThe colors most certainly exist without the name. You may have described the fruit as being a weird shade of red, but if someone held up something red and said "so it was this color" you'd say no. Conversely if someone held up something that was actually orange colored, you'd say "yeah it was that color." Similarly, you may have no idea what the name is for the color of a Tangerine, but you know what that color is. You might describe it as a dark orange. If I say the name for it is coquelicot, you can look up coquelicot and see if it matches the color you picture in your mind.
- jcims 7mo agoCan each device vary the color or is it fixed based on how it’s built? Seems the latter?
- 2ndorderthought 7mo agoI believe you are right.
- __MatrixMan__ 7mo agoI'll take one in gamma please.
- Retro_Dev 7mo agoA gamma wavelength handheld laser would be cool; "and on this petri dish, we see a dot of cells instantaneously develop cancer"
- __MatrixMan__ 7mo agoAt high energies I think you could point two at a spot in space and get antimatter where the beams cross (also matter, and then an explosion... see the Breit-Wheeler process). We have a hard enough time building shipping-container sized devices that reflect extreme ultraviolet though... so I think a handheld gamma ray laser is off the table for this century.
- saltcured 7mo agoBut, is there any property of that point in space you could measure by how exactly this occurs? I.e. could you make some kind of massive confocal telescope using this effect in place of regular multi-photon fluorescence, to measure a 3D volume of space?
- __MatrixMan__ 7mo agoI just thought it would be fun to have a tiny ball of destruction that I could move around arbitrarily. What would I do with it? I dunno... maybe something resembling CNC milling? Etch "hello world" on the inside of a containiner without opening it? As for building a sensor with it goes... I suppose you could create sources of light very far away without bothering to send an emitter or reflector to that location. Seems like you could use this to build a gravitational wave telescope that was much bigger than the earth. Probably you could also break some rules regarding line-of-sight communication. If you want to transmit around an inconveniently placed moon you could send an amplitude modulated signal at point on the moon's side, the receiver could send a beam that was nearly at the pair production threshold aimed at the same point. The signal, where it intersected the beam, would take the photon flux over the threshold, repeating your signal from a more advantageous location. Although since we're already invoking godlike technology here... you might as well just use neutrinos to communicate directly through that moon.
- himata4113 7mo agosince 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?
- tbrownaw 7mo agoVisible light is a bit less than a petahertz, so no.
- osamagirl69 7mo agoWould you care to explain how the NICT guys achieved 402Tb/s through a single (50km long!) fiber back in 2024 then? It seems like another factor of two would easily be in reach if they could extend their setup into the visible.
- lefra 7mo agoFibers are not transparent enough in visible. I found about 10dB/km (to be compared with 0.2 dB/km around 1550nm) [0]. This means that after every km the light intensity is divided by 10, which is completely impractical for telecommunications. [0] https://media.thorlabs.com/globalassets/family-pages/sharedassets/s/sm/sm_fluoride_fiber_attenuation_comparison_g1-780.gif?v=1117010007 https://media.thorlabs.com/globalassets/family-pages/shareda...
- osamagirl69 7mo agoThat depends on the application, the standard for short range (<100m -- fine for most anything that doesn't leave your building) is already to use 800nm.
- postalrat 7mo agoModulate frequencies, polarization, phase, amplitude, etc and you can send quite a bit.
- guzfip 7mo agoVery cool stuff. I regret wasting my life in software when I see other fields still doing interesting work.
- jagged-chisel 7mo agoThe "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?
- deepsun 7mo agoState for longer. It starts shrinking only after a minute.
- tclancy 7mo agoYou have to not blink too much or it resets the effect. After about a minute, the intense blue shows up around the red. And I say that as a man who has yet to see anything in a Magic Eye poster after a half century of what some would call life.
- jagged-chisel 7mo agoI also lack stereopsis- those posters are always just noise to me. I always wonder whether some of these visual tests only work on those with normal stereo perception.
- deepsun 7mo agoWould I finally be able to see bright brown?
- nine_k 7mo agoIt's called orange. Much like bright gray is called white, and bright teal is called turquoise.
- rafram 7mo agoLight brown is called tan. Dark and light oranges exist too and they’re not exactly the same as brown.
- drivers99 7mo agoSee Technology Connections' video about Brown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU He says brown is perceived when you see an orange-wavelength light that is significantly darker than its surroundings, providing the necessary context for your brain to interpret it as brown.
- joquarky 7mo agoTan is not a hue. Orange is.
- spaqin 7mo agoThat'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.
- packetlost 7mo agoNeutral atom too. You need fairly clean light to pump atoms into Rydberg states
- evo 7mo agoI wonder if this is a nuclear proliferation risk--could it be used for AVLIS/SILEX?
- nabakin 7mo ago> 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.
- NL807 7mo agoIn electric circuits, information is transmitted through the electric field, which itself is close to the speed of light.
- tempaccount5050 7mo agoNope, it's 1/2 - 2/3 the speed of light depending on the metals used.
- spwa4 7mo agoYou're both wrong. It's true that the first whisper of movement travels at the speed of light, but the time until the flow stabilizes (which you WILL need to wait for in electrical chips) is actually slower than the "speed of electricity". Oh and also: currently the idea behind on-chip lasers is interconnects that don't have this limitation. For example, PCIE is looking to build optical interconnects, which will do the equivalent of bringing every GPU 10x closer to the memory. Optical computation would require that light switches light transistors on and off, which doesn't seem to be possible with this technology. This is optical computation in the sense of allowing light beams to be produced according to formulas.
- BenjiWiebe 7mo agoWhy do you need to wait for it to stabilize? You can keep changing the voltage at one end of the connection even if you have megabits of data currently in transit, without waiting for it to stabilize. Yes, you'll need to do impedance matching. Yes, that's a solved problem. Transmission lines.
- spacedoutman 7mo agoMy first thought is this will be used as a weapon to bypass protections against specific wavelengths
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- rogmash 7mo ago[dead]
- wizardforhire 7mo agoJust 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
- krenzo 7mo agoThe actual paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08092 https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08092
- chasil 7mo agoIf only. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_laser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_laser
- saltcured 7mo agoHa, thanks for that. It answered my question of whether it would be called a graser. I guess the little scifi reader in me was hoping someone reserved that term for some kind of coherent gravity wave emitter though ;-)
- xphos 7mo agoI 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
- jjmarr 7mo agoI'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.
- travisjungroth 7mo agoI want all the colors! Give me the full spectral power distribution!
- madaxe_again 7mo agoPromptly cooks in the microwave and infrared, and fries in X-ray and gamma radiation Ahh true HDR
- smallerize 7mo agoThat sounds cool but how do you encode the image data?
- zh3 7mo agoJust save pixel values as wavelength rather than RGB?
- ledoge 7mo agoThat's the easy part, just use a color space with imaginary primaries (see e.g. ProPhoto RGB), or use one with real primaries that allows for negative values – e.g. Windows uses floating point scRGB for HDR, which is just linear BT.709/sRGB, but negative RGB values can be used to cover the full range of real and imaginary colors.
- smallerize 7mo agoBut that's still mixing just a few primary wavelengths.
- jjmarr 7mo agoThe DCT of wavelengths that create the non-spectral colour. No clue how you'd film in this format but the CGI and video games would be epic.
- lwansbrough 7mo ago0.1nm please. It's x-ray lithography time!
- loudmax 7mo agoI was thinking the same thing. The stuff ASML does to produce a light at exactly the right wavelength is bananas. Making of stream of molten tin, and shooting each droplet with a laser, twice! Then bouncing the light through a series of super high precision mirrors to capture just the right spread. If you can get a laser to produce your desired wavelength without all that complexity, that's a major breakthrough.
- anigbrowl 7mo agoI wonder if photonic computing with variable wavelengths essentially gives you a float type in silico.
- wyager 7mo agoThe final frontier of display tech (as far as being able to elicit any physiologically possible eye response) is a pair of tunable lasers. You really can't go much farther than that for emissive displays! We're almost saturated (no pun intended) on useful resolution, so I expect color to be the next area of focus.
- noobermin 7mo agoJust in time for the Trump Admin to cut some of their funding to reallocate money for a fraction of the Trump Arch.
- pseudocoup 7mo ago> Computer chips that cram billions of electronic devices into a few square inches have powered the digital economy and transformed the world. Much power so chip
- SEJeff 7mo agoThe US Navy has been working on their idea of a holy grail they have deemed the free electron laser[1] [1] https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2010-03-18-Boeing-Completes-Preliminary-Design-of-Free-Electron-Laser-Weapon-System https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2010-03-18-Boeing-Completes-Pre...
- punkbrwstr 7mo agoHow quickly can they get this in the Yuma tent
- DarenWatson 7mo agoIt’s really fascinating electrons took 60 years to go from chip to a smart device and if photons follow the same thing then we just fired the starting gun. It’s really interesting to see tantala material takes a single laser color in and spits out to a full rainbow.
- foxes 7mo agoFrom reading assume they mean wavelength of ~ visible light. I too would like a microwave or gamma laser
- HNisCIS 7mo agoSomething to be aware of, the laser safety goggles used by lab workers, pilots, soldiers etc are based on the premise that lasers only occupy extremely specific and narrow parts of the spectrum so by just blocking those little bits, you can get a very effective pair of glasses that doesn't significantly effect visibility. Arbitrary waveform lasers cause problems here.
- acd 7mo agoSounds useful for display purposes
- calrain 7mo agoSo does this become a new display type? Laser TV?
- MeteorMarc 7mo agoTitle is misleading. This is about integrated optics that can do "computation" on the frequency of laser input using all kinds of nonlinear optical effects.
- momoschili 7mo agoI don't think so- seems like they demonstrated a supercontinuum source, which is a pretty good approximation of "any wavelength" laser. Pretty cool on an integrated chip.
- MeteorMarc 7mo agoWhere is the source? Tantalo does not produce photons, it is not like GaAs that you can pump and get stimulated emission. The Nature paper does not have laser in the title.
- momoschili 7mo agoits purpose isn't to produce photons, neither is the lithium niobate. The purpose is act as a material to mediate the nonlinear interactions between photons to achieve fun things like supercontinuums, frequency comb generation, etc. Think of it like the phosphor on your white LED - it produces no photons by itself, but it takes in the blue photons and remits them in a different spectrum. Obviously different physics, but still a similar concept.
- blurbleblurble 7mo agowhat a waste of money! just kidding this is amazing
- ginko 7mo agoWith two of these you should be able to display any color in the CIE colorspace.
- dtgriscom 7mo agoThat picture of the wafer with a rainbow of shapes is very misleading. It suggests that the various colors you see on the chip is the various colors the lasers can emit, which is wrong; it's just diffraction, and has nothing to do with the topic of the article. (But, PR people gotta PR...)
- protontypes 7mo agoIn fact, regular tunable wavelength lasers do work with diffraction gratings. https://www.edmundoptics.com/knowledge-center/application-notes/optics/all-about-diffraction-gratings/ https://www.edmundoptics.com/knowledge-center/application-no...
- xbmcuser 7mo agoIs this the cheaper way to get to extreme uv lithography as from what I understand the largest bottle neck for China has been to get the exact wavelength needed to go small enough?
- KK7NIL 7mo agoNo, the problem is getting a high power (hundreds of watts) and high uptime EUV source, there's no reason to think this is a step towards that at the moment.
- jason_s 7mo agoNow I have the Pink Floyd song in my head: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8pEjmZVx3k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8pEjmZVx3k
- aj7 7mo agoJust want to remind people that the deBroglie wavelength of light IS its wavelength, here 0.5-1.5 um. This is gigantic compared to that of electrons in semiconductors. So there is no VLSI for optical computation. None. Zero. Bupkis. Lasers, except perhaps for some very esoteric applications, will be confined to the periphery where waveguides and fiber are rapidly supplanting copper. By the way, at least $1B has been wasted by VC’s who did not understand the no-VLSI physics barrier.
- aj7 7mo agoI should add that analytical device applications of this technology look almost limitless, being able to simplify, shrink, and cheapen thousands of optical instrumentation types. This is a huge market, and will lead to better healthcare, pharmaceuticals and industrial monitoring. Displays are another area, and military, policing, criminology, another. Having a narrowband laser of your choice of wavelength is the holy grail here.
- thayne 7mo agoDoes this mean they can create a chip that emits light at a specific frequency they choose? Or the chip can emit a programmable frequency that is controlled "at runtime" so to speak? I wasn't able to figure that out from the article.