NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers

mapt

Is there a single person here interested in photonic computing that wants to explain to the class if there's any "there" there?

aftbit

Cool, can I get a "proper" yellow diode laser from this? What's the efficiency look like?

jiveturkey

But can it produce magenta?

staplung

What if I like magenta? Or brown?

analog8374

can they do microwave? if you do the exact right color you can make certain things melt very precisely.

cheschire

Yes but can it do any color a mantis shrimp would like? https://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp

adzm

Everyone 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

jcims

Can each device vary the color or is it fixed based on how it’s built? Seems the latter?

__MatrixMan__

I'll take one in gamma please.

guzfip

Very cool stuff. I regret wasting my life in software when I see other fields still doing interesting work.

jagged-chisel

The "shrinking" circle: I did as asked and clicked the image to see the animation. I saw no shrinking. My eyes did fatigue and I saw the border between the red and green become a blurred gradient. What should I have experienced?

deepsun

Would I finally be able to see bright brown?

himata4113

since 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?

spaqin

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.

evo

I wonder if this is a nuclear proliferation risk--could it be used for AVLIS/SILEX?

nabakin

> 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.

spacedoutman

My first thought is this will be used as a weapon to bypass protections against specific wavelengths

wizardforhire

Just 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

krenzo

The actual paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08092

chasil

If only. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_laser