Would I finally be able to see bright brown?
It's called orange. Much like bright gray is called white, and bright teal is called turquoise.
Light brown is called tan. Dark and light oranges exist too and they’re not exactly the same as brown.
NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers
61–70 of 201 posts
Re: NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
* Concert lasers just got a lot cooler.
Concert tickets will still remain very hot though.
Re: NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers
#63My first thought is this will be used as a weapon to bypass protections against specific wavelengths
Re: NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers
#64Earlier 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.
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.
It reminds me of how vinyl records are fairly lossy, but they provide a superior experience in some cases because those limitations have been accounted for during the mastering process.
It's an entire pipeline from photomultiplier to recording medium to the inverse process and everything is optimized not for any particular mathematical truth but for the subjective experience.
Re: NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers
#65since 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.
Would 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.
Re: NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers
#66[deleted]
Re: NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers
#67Is there a single person here interested in photonic computing that wants to explain to the class if there's any "there" there?
Not 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.
Re: NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers
#68[dead]
Re: NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers
#69Just 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
Re: NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers
#70The actual paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08092