Dark Pulse Laser, 2010
by NIST/Science Source
Title
Dark Pulse Laser, 2010
Artist
NIST/Science Source
Medium
Photograph - Photograph
Description
Colorized trace of pulses from the NIST/JILA dark pulse laser, indicating the light output nearly shuts down about every 2.5 nanoseconds. A new type of laser that emits "dark" pulses could provide better signals for telecommunications, according to physicists in the US who have created the device. The dark pulses, which consist of intensity dips in an otherwise continuous beam of laser light, are effectively the opposite of the bright bursts in a normal pulsed laser." The laser emits a brief pulse of darkness, if you will," explains one of the researchers Richard Mirin, who is at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado. "And so you can think of it as a continuous-wave laser that has a really fast shutter in front of it." Dark lasers are not entirely new. For some 20 years, physicists have been able to create so-called dark soliton lasers. Solitons are light pulses that propagate without spreading, and are often used in fibre optics. Their dark counterparts are simply gaps in a continuous beam that do not spread either. But dark solitons are difficult to create and, when they are created, it is done outside the laser using a combination of tricky pulse-shaping techniques.
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January 24th, 2017
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