Scientists Invent a 'Laser' That Fires Electrical Charge, Not Light

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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From the “Now we’re getting somewhere” file, researchers, quite by accident discovered how to ‘shoot’ an electrical charge instead of a beam of light. I don’t know about you, but I’m pre-ordering my Phaser this week. :D

It promises to create a new class of lasers that use 250 times less energy than today's, and that's not even the craziest part.
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Then it's not a LASER by any means then. Light Amplification by Stimulation Emission of Radiation.

No Light, no Laser.
 
No, it's an actual laser that generates, in this particular case, ultra-violet light with extremely little power consumption. What they're doing is using a very unique quirk (not quark) of physics to do so very efficiently. It's not "shooting" electrical charges (Bad Steve! Bad!), it's using polariton decay to generate the UV beam.

If people would actually read the article they'd understand this.
 
Phoenix333 said:
No, it's an actual laser that generates, in this particular case, ultra-violet light with extremely little power consumption. What they're doing is using a very unique quirk (not quark) of physics to do so very efficiently. It's not "shooting" electrical charges (Bad Steve! Bad!), it's using polariton decay to generate the UV beam.

If people would actually read the article they'd understand this.
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This. The article says nothing is the sort that an electrical charge is fired ala a laser.

Regardless, even if an electrical charge was fired in such a way, it's nothing new; election beams have existed for quite some time.
 
Enilder said:
candidates...didn't know that you can't edit posts here...
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You can't edit posts in the front page news section.

It seems barely anyone (including the Gizmodo "author") reads the articles they talk about.
 
I hope these guys are swimming in money soon. This could be one of those good things that advance the world.
 
viscountalpha said:
Then it's not a LASER by any means then. Light Amplification by Stimulation Emission of Radiation.

No Light, no Laser.
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Cosmos has taught me that light and electricity are the same force, Electromagnetism. Light just changes between electric and magnetic very fast. So I'm guessing they just canceled one out and made an electric laser?
 
Photons are still the only output in this new type of laser. The gain medium is simply multiplied with polariton current instead of electrons and light.

The title of the Gizmodo article is hopelessly misleading.

It just uses way less power. If the out power can be ramped up then this may be a solution to the problems they are having at laser labs and inertial confinement fusion experiments.
 
Looks like we are finally getting on Nikola Tesla's level...
 
Ashbringer said:
Cosmos has taught me that light and electricity are the same force, Electromagnetism. Light just changes between electric and magnetic very fast. So I'm guessing they just canceled one out and made an electric laser?
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Way oversimplified view. You would do better to stop watching cosmos...it's extremely misleading. Light is from photons, electricity is from electrons. Fundamentally different particles. The only thing in common is the propagation by wave: Magnetic fields from electrons travel in waves as do non-collimated photons.

This article is also misleading, it talks about photons travelling and creating an electron hole, which is the opposite of electricity (no electrons). They roughly equate the absence of electrons as creating a positive charge (I guess they are just like any other over-sensationalized media source serving to amuse the uneducated).
 
Now they just have to work on getting the beam to stop about 2 feet from the emitter. Lightsaber!
 
From what I understand about polariton lasers, these are going to be great for small super low powered applications like computers and such, but don't expect a handheld polariton based weapon as I don't think these scale up very well.
 
Why is this news. Blasting a laser pulse to ionize the air and zap an electrical current down that now "conductor" is pretty obvious.
 
BBA said:
This article is also misleading, it talks about photons travelling and creating an electron hole, which is the opposite of electricity (no electrons). They roughly equate the absence of electrons as creating a positive charge (I guess they are just like any other over-sensationalized media source serving to amuse the uneducated).
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That was the thing I hated about my graduate studies of physics, was all these "quasi-particles", an electron holes are simply where there is no electron where there should be, fair enough... however you can mathematically treat it as if it was an actual particle with a positive charge, and you can do all sorts of current flow and other things with it (Semiconductor physics). Just like phonons, "sound particles", there's no such thing as sound particles, but you can mathematically treat them as such.
 
sfsuphysics said:
That was the thing I hated about my graduate studies of physics, was all these "quasi-particles", an electron holes are simply where there is no electron where there should be, fair enough... however you can mathematically treat it as if it was an actual particle with a positive charge, and you can do all sorts of current flow and other things with it (Semiconductor physics). Just like phonons, "sound particles", there's no such thing as sound particles, but you can mathematically treat them as such.
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Think of a set of 6 guitar strings. Now lay another set on top and bottom so they are all lined up. Now vibrate all the strings at different frequencies that are wide enough to be visible waves. If you look through all three sets of strings you will see how virtual particles can be 'real'. The holes are just as real as the non-holes as the waves propagate.
 
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