"Our device is a laser that works with earlier versions, absorbing light at specific frequencies instead of emitting," said that Yale University professor Hui Cao, who invented the device with the colleague, Professor of physics at Yale r. Douglas Stone and number 18 February the journal Science has published the results of physics.
"It absorbs the light creating a trap inside a cavity that contains absorbing materials, so that eventually absorbed all the light", Cao told TechNewsWorld.
"Physicists several have hinted to the concept of an anti-laser in books and journals, but nobody ever developed the idea," Stone explains.
The technique can both increase and decrease the absorption of light, making it a candidate optical switch, says Frost & Sullivan telecommunications program director Michael Jude.
"It's an interesting device that introduces many features potential but also poses some challenges of design," Jude told TechNewsWorld.
Invented in 1960, the conventional laser using an "average earnings"--usually a semiconducting gallium arsenide as--glue and emit a beam of light waves with the same frequency and amplitude. So is ultra-focused laser light that has powerful properties, from cutting through steel to transfer information at the speed of light in computer and telecommunication networks.
The opposite of "gain" is the "loss", and the team at Yale has used another semiconductor material--silicon--as a "loss" means to build a non-coherent light emitter, but a consistent perfect absorber (CPA). To demonstrate, they shot two laser beams in a cavity containing a silicon wafers that trapped the light waves, causing them to bounce back and forth until the cavities li turned into heat.
Consistent (Nasdaq: OPEN) perfect absorbers could be used as optical switches and tracers in optics Next-Gen supercomputers, stone explained. They could also be useful to direct radiation therapies in small regions that contain cancer cells.
"Think the optical domain as similar to the electronic domain," said Jude Frost & Sullivan. "Both have active devices, such as gates and passive devices such as resistors and capacitors that alternate with a signal or change its frequency. In optics, have worked on both types of elements, while focusing much on the question, ' what is an appropriate device in passive optical domain? ' When I watch this anti-laser, I'm saying, ' Oh! There is an appropriate device in passive optical domain. There is an optical resistor. ""
To construct a workable resistor, the Yale team needs to build in various degrees of transfer efficiency of light, just as an electronic engineer would build resistors with varying degrees of resistance: 50%, 25% and so on, Jude explained.
But to build a better resistance in mind, the anti-laser was supposed to become the laser "almost anti".
"If they can optimize this device so that at least a little light can get through, in varying amounts, it may be useful in passive optical domain," said Jude.
Now, however, Yale scientists are working from just the opposite problem: how to get their anti-laser to absorb the 99.999% of incoming light, to the theoretical limit. The current version absorbs 99.4%.
"We built the CPA is just a proof of concept," Stone told TechNewsWorld. "I am confident that we will start approaching the theoretical limit as we build more sophisticated CPAs."
Greater sophistication--like Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) has demonstrated repeatedly--smaller means. CPAs future probably will be reduced from current width one centimeter to six microns, much smaller than a human hair.
Compaction can be essential if the device is distributed in large numbers, Michael Jude explained.
"One of the virtues of optical computing that doesn't leave much waste heat--but as the dust absorbs laser light, produces heat," said Jude. "In the technologies that use CPAs in quantities which could lead to some limitations of heat dissipation.
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