News tagged with laser light

Proposed gamma-ray laser could emit 'nuclear light'

(PhysOrg.com) -- Building a nuclear gamma-ray laser has been a challenge for scientists for a long time, but a new proposal for such a device has overcome some of the most difficult problems. In the new study, Eugene Tkalya ...

Physics / Optics & Photonics

created May 02, 2011 | popularity 4.6 / 5 (20) | comments 12 | with audio podcast feature

Creating light sources for nanochips

(PhysOrg.com) -- "One of the most important goals in the optics community is to create and manipulate light on chip," Yinan Zhang tells PhysOrg.com. "This is especially important when it comes to improving the performance of sem ...

Physics / Optics & Photonics

created Aug 25, 2010 | popularity 4.3 / 5 (9) | comments 0 | with audio podcast feature

Rotating Space Elevator Propels its Own Load

(PhysOrg.com) -- The idea of the space elevator just got a little crazier. While the “traditional” concept involved using rocket propulsion or laser light pressure to propel loads up a cable anchored to Earth, ...

Physics / General Physics

created May 21, 2009 | popularity 4.6 / 5 (47) | comments 33 feature

'Squeezing' light into quantum dots

(PhysOrg.com) -- “Quantum wells have been instrumental in telecommunications, enabling light amplification,” Patanjali Kambhampati tells PhysOrg.com, “but theory has suggested that a very small - colloidal - quantum dot co ...

Physics / Quantum Physics

created Apr 01, 2009 | popularity 4.3 / 5 (11) | comments 2 feature

Quantum dots as midinfrared emitters

(PhysOrg.com) -- “People are interested in the mid-infrared,” Dan Wasserman tells PhysOrg.com. Infrared light has a wavelength longer than visible light, and many molecules have numerous very strong optical resonances in the ...

Physics / Optics & Photonics

created Feb 23, 2009 | popularity 4.1 / 5 (10) | comments 1 feature

The Power of Light: Moving Macroscopic Amounts of Matter

(PhysOrg.com) -- Since 1970, scientists have been working with “optical tweezers” - lasers that move microscopic amounts of matter using forces originating from the light matter interaction. Now, for the first ...

Physics / General Physics

created Jan 29, 2009 | popularity 3.3 / 5 (12) | comments 17 feature

First, fast, and faster

(Phys.org) -- Scientists in PML's Quantum Measurement Division have produced the first superluminal light pulses made by using a technique called four-wave mixing, creating two separate pulses whose peaks ...

Physics / Optics & Photonics

created Apr 06, 2012 | popularity 4.6 / 5 (25) | comments 33 | with audio podcast

Physicists build highly efficient 'no-waste' laser

A team of University of California, San Diego researchers has built the smallest room-temperature nanolaser to date, as well as an even more startling device: a highly efficient, "thresholdless" laser that ...

Physics / General Physics

created Feb 08, 2012 | popularity 4.9 / 5 (23) | comments 5 | with audio podcast

First atomic X-ray laser created

Scientists working at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have created the shortest, purest X-ray laser pulses ever achieved, fulfilling a 45-year-old prediction and ...

Physics / General Physics

created Jan 25, 2012 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (29) | comments 14 | with audio podcast

World's most powerful X-ray laser creates two-million-degree matter

Researchers working at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have used the world's most powerful X-ray laser to create and probe a two-million-degree piece of matter in a controlled way for the first time. ...

Physics / General Physics

created Jan 25, 2012 | popularity 5 / 5 (15) | comments 2 | with audio podcast

Flipping an egg carton of light traps giant atoms

(PhysOrg.com) -- In an egg carton of laser light, University of Michigan physicists can trap giant Rydberg atoms with up to 90 percent efficiency, an achievement that could advance quantum computing and terahertz ...

Physics / General Physics

created Dec 23, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (4) | comments 7 | with audio podcast

High-quality white light produced by four-color laser source

(PhysOrg.com) -- The human eye is as comfortable with white light generated by diode lasers as with that produced by increasingly popular light-emitting diodes (LEDs), according to tests conceived at Sandia ...

Physics / Optics & Photonics

created Oct 26, 2011 | popularity 4.9 / 5 (10) | comments 19 | with audio podcast

'Microring' device could aid in future optical technologies

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at Purdue University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have created a device small enough to fit on a computer chip that converts continuous laser light ...

Physics / Optics & Photonics

created Oct 19, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (2) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Physicists localize 3-D matter waves for first time (w/ video)

University of Illinois physicists have experimentally demonstrated for the first time how three-dimensional conduction is affected by the defects that plague materials. Understanding these effects is important ...

Physics / General Physics

created Oct 07, 2011 | popularity 4.9 / 5 (15) | comments 6 | with audio podcast

Laser light used to cool object to quantum ground state

For the first time, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), in collaboration with a team from the University of Vienna, have managed to cool a miniature mechanical object to its lowest ...

Physics / Quantum Physics

created Oct 05, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (9) | comments 4 | with audio podcast

Laser

A laser is a device that emits light (electromagnetic radiation) through a process called stimulated emission. The term laser is an acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. Laser light is usually spatially coherent, which means that the light either is emitted in a narrow, low-divergence beam, or can be converted into one with the help of optical components such as lenses. Typically, lasers are thought of as emitting light with a narrow wavelength spectrum ("monochromatic" light). This is not true of all lasers, however: some emit light with a broad spectrum, while others emit light at multiple distinct wavelengths simultaneously. The coherence of typical laser emission is distinctive. Most other light sources emit incoherent light, which has a phase that varies randomly with time and position.

For more information about Laser, read the full article at Wikipedia.
This text uses material from Wikipedia and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Related topics: light , laser , electrons , molecules , atoms