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.
NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers
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Re: NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers
#52I wonder if this is a nuclear proliferation risk--could it be used for AVLIS/SILEX?
Re: NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers
#53I'll take one in gamma please.
A gamma wavelength handheld laser would be cool; "and on this petri dish, we see a dot of cells instantaneously develop cancer"
At 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.
Re: NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers
#54That'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.
Neutral atom too. You need fairly clean light to pump atoms into Rydberg states
Re: NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers
#55Everyone 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
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.
I think it's important to remember that we're not perceiving some fundamental aspect of light. We're perceiving how the photosensitive portions of our retina convert light to stimulus, and how our brains construct a meaningful image from that stimulus in our mind.
Like film photography doesn't happen in the lens or the world. It happens in that photosensitive chemical reaction, and the decision of the photographer.
Re: NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers
#56Yes but can it do any color a mantis shrimp would like? https://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp
This 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.
Re: NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But also - colours don't exist without a name eg. Before Orange, there was only shades of yellow or reds
The 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.
Re: NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers
#58since 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?
Visible light is a bit less than a petahertz, so no.
Re: NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers
#59> 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.
Re: NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers
#60Is there a single person here interested in photonic computing that wants to explain to the class if there's any "there" there?
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 pr…
Fiber 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.