Lasers & Holography

For the latest Holography Forum contest I made a hologram of Snoopy and Woodstock.

I'd originally planned for the final hologram to be a bit different but I'm happy with what I've got.

Read on for the making of Friends.

Through October 6th, 2006.

Upon entering the Davis Art Gallery, the panes of glass mounted on stands and hanging from the wall seem transparent, as if you could see the entire exhibit by peering through a single pane.

But with a few steps forward, a sudden, silent firework explodes, flooding your retina with colored lights that seem to jump from the glass sheet. By moving your head and feet, a pattern of circles and triangles form and continue to alter as you change your vantage point.

It's Video Friday!

More silliness with a cat chasing a laser dot, again at the now defunct Celtic Store in Dallas.

Have a great weekend.

According to uni-protokolle.de:

A group of physicists led by Prof. Sergej Demokritov from the Institute of Applied Physics, University of Münster, in cooperation with physicists from Kaiserslautern University of Technology (Germany), Oakland University (USA), and Kiev University (Ukraine) has recently found a tricky way to enhance the number of magnons in the gas significantly by exciting additional magnons using microwaves. Thus, the number of magnons in the gas could be increased considerably. Although the additional magnons exist only during one millionth of a second, the scientists were able to investigate the gas behaviour using a laser probe beam technique. Thus, the scientists from Münster who are performing their work in the Münster Center for Nonlinear Science, have succeeded to show that additional magnons in fact initiate the condensation of magnons in a collective quantum state even at room temperature, as it was predicted by A. Einstein. A report on this work has been recently published in Nature.

Alright, so China's already aggressive in a number of ways.

Now they're getting into the act by testing their laser systems on spy satellites.

According to Defense News:

China has fired high-power lasers at U.S. spy satellites flying over its territory in what experts see as a test of Chinese ability to blind the spacecraft, according to sources.

Given that China is the current leader in cheap lasers, I wonder what kind of power they're holding back for military use.

If you keep looking over the fence at you neighbor’s back yard, you’re going to get poked in the eye, so it’s not surprising that China might be worried about U.S. forces stationed on their doorstep

Researchers at St Andrews University have developed a method of using a femtosecond laser to pierce cell walls to allow drugs and DNA to enter the cell. The cell is able to heal itself but not before material is assimilated into the cell.

The art of using a laser to make a hole or pore in a cell membrane is called photoporation. Such a procedure creates an opportunity for DNA to enter the cell before the pore closes and the cell heals itself. If the DNA is then transcribed and translated into a protein, the process is known as optical transfection

Continue reading "Cell piercing with lasers"

Intel and UCSB have developed a hybrid silicon laser and both emits and guides light. This could have wide-ranging effects on the telecommunications and computer industry.

This breakthrough addresses one of the last major barriers to producing low-cost, high-bandwidth silicon photonics devices for use inside and around future computers and data centers.

It's pretty easy to imagine very high bandwidth connections between devices that would allow all sorts of computing extensions using less space on the desktop and without one central "box" that many of us have become used to.

Ever spun laser light in an Erlenmeyer flask? I have.

Unfortunately the picture is of their monochrome "cigarette pack" system but Light Blue Optics has recently demonstrated their color system to the editors of Electronics Weekly.

The device uses an active LCD to modulate the three laser beams and generates several images in each color per frame to reduce the "noise" (speckle?) produced.

The image actually leaves the modulator with a narrow divergence angle which is broadened by anything up to 115 degrees by a two-lens group.

A considerable amount of number-crunching goes into driving the LCD, using algorithms developed by the firm.

These algorithms allow the image to be: pointed in any direction within its angular limits, and altered in geometry.

For example, imagining the projector like a small camera standing on a desk, the image could be computed for a vertical screen sitting on the desk, or for the desk surface in front of the projector. Both would be neat, rectangular and focused images, and no change in the optical path would be required to switch between the two.

SlingshotShop.com has released a new sling shot for the aiming impaired.

It's powered by a decent sized power band, has an arm brace to make things easy on your wrist and is aimed with, you guessed it, a laser.

The PS-52 is small enough to slide into your back pocket or can be carried in your fishing box. Using the laser sight, you can accurately, quickly & effectively strike a target. Simply point the laser at your target & shoot.

Sounds to me like they're encouraging all kinds of mischief but with a laser sight at least the target will get some warning.

Fujitsu and Mitsui have launched a new company to market quantum dot lasers. From their press release

Quantum dots, from which the new venture takes its name, are semiconductor particles that are a single nanometer (one billionth of a meter) in size. Quantum dots and technology utilizing quantum dots were developed through an academic-industrial research collaboration by Fujitsu Limited, Fujitsu Laboratories, and Professor Yasuhiko Arakawa's laboratory at the University of Tokyo. Quantum dot lasers, which use this technology, are revolutionary lasers that are significantly superior to conventional semiconductor lasers in that they feature higher performance in such aspects as temperature-independent operation, low power consumption, long-distance transmission, and high speed. It is anticipated that quantum dot lasers will become a core technology to realize high-performance light sources for optical telecommunication, for which data traffic is continuing to increase rapidly.

Their primary market in the beginning will be telecommunications.

Hitachi in collaboration with Tsukuba University has announced that it has developed a robot called EMIEW which stands for Excellent Mobility and Interactive Existence as Workmate and is capable of navigating crowds using laser ranging.

MIEW is fitted with a "collision avoidance" function; that is, on detecting surrounding objects while in motion by means of mounted sensors, it confirms their location and movement, and then calculates the route it should take to avoid a collision with those objects. In contrast to technologies used in conventional types of "humanoid robots", this new technology gives robots the necessary functions for coexistence and cooperation with humans in real life.

It also balances on two wheels and can interact vocally (somewhat) with people through its limited vocabulary of about 100 words.

I for one am ready to welcome our new robot overlords.

Are terabyte optical disks headed our way? It sounds like it.

Engineers and applied scientists from Harvard University have demonstrated a new photonic device with a wide range of potential commercial applications, including dramatically higher capacity for optical data storage. Termed a plasmonic laser antenna, the design consists of a metallic nanostructure, known as an optical antenna, integrated onto the facet of a commercial semiconductor laser.

"The optical antenna collects light from the laser and concentrates it to an intense spot measuring tens of nanometers, or about one-thousandth the width of a single human hair," says Ken Crozier of Harvard. "The device could be integrated into optical data storage platforms and used to write bits far smaller than what's now possible with conventional methods. This could lead to vastly increased storage capacities in the terabyte range (a thousand gigabytes)."

It won't be long before tourists to Ft Lauderdale will be dazzled by laser light as they walk through Huizenga Park

By years end they should have a new installation in place that will

soon turn one downtown Fort Lauderdale park into an interactive art display, with lasers bathing trees in sequences of color and transforming grass into a sea of almost translucent reeds of light.

The laser-light project is expected to be installed in Huizenga Park by the end of the year and will include motion sensors that will set off light displays on 34 trees along the perimeter as well as across the lawn between the park's fountain and its performance stage.

The artist, Seattle based Dan Corson had originally envisioned lighting up the nearby New River but discovered that the river is so murky that even lights similar to those used in the movie Titanic barely worked.

Residents and businesses near the fountain pictured above originally weren't thrilled with the music that went with the fountain but are pleased with the light show and are looking to additional lighting from the laser project.

The trees in the park will be cast in white light until people walk by or activate one of five motion sensors in the sidewalks. The tree lights will change either as the person moves by or as part of a 3-to-5-minute programmed sequence. With the lawn, green lasers will be activated by people sitting on or walking by a bench near the fountain and will run through a variety of programmed sequences.

"It will be a real unique experience," Downtown Development Authority board member Jack Loos said. "All great downtowns involve art and involve interesting and unique things. To the extent we can, we should bring more art that can draw people and make it a more attractive place to be."

To quote the BBC News

The 2006 Millennium Technology Prize has been awarded to Professor Shuji Nakamura, the inventor who is said to have kicked started the "blue laser revolution"

More than 10 years agao professor Nakamura invented light-emitting semiconductors including a blue semiconductor laser. Since then many refinements have been made and his blue light has been spreading and is used in home lighting, video displays and communication technology.

From Science Watch

Nakamura may have single-handedly, or virtually so, changed the technological face of the world. And his research papers certainly reflect his influence: a few years back his paper on "InGaN-based multi-quantum well-structure laser diodes" (see the table on the next page, paper #1) was number 6 on the Science Watch list of Red Hot Research Papers of 1996 one of only three physical-sciences papers to rank among the year's most-cited reports. That paper subsequently enjoyed a long run in the Physics Top Ten during 1997. More recently, a 1998 paper, "Continuous-wave operation of InGaN/GaN/AlGaN-based laser diodes grown on an epitaxially laterally overgrown GaN substrate" (Appl. Phys. Lett., 72[2]:211-3, 1998), has also appeared among the Top Ten. "What I have managed to achieve," Nakamura has written, "shows that anybody with relatively little special experience in the field, no big money, and no collaborations with universities or other companies, can achieve considerable success alone when he tries a new research area without being obsessed with conventional ideas and knowledge."

While people may be moaning about PS3 delays due to shortages of blue lasers, that same laser is taking information storage several steps further and increasing the amount of data one can store on a single piece of media well past 100GB.