Lasers & Holography

Got an email from Laserglow.com with a price reduction on their high power laser pointers. I haven't used their lasers so I can't comment on their quality and reliability but if you're looking for more power to play with you might check them out.

Laserglow.com has reduced ALL prices on EVERY Aries and Hercules Series high-powered handheld laser by 20 to 45%!

Owning a high-powered (20-400mW) handheld laser has never been so affordable. This price reduction was brought about by the recent popularity of our products among hobbyists and professionals. As a result, we have increased production and subsequently dropped prices. For full details on our new pricing structure, please see www.laserglow.com.

In addition, use the Voucher Code 106221132 on our website before Monday, November 6th, and get an additional 5% off any purchase!

Limited time 5% discount is only applicable to orders placed on the Laserglow.com website. Promotion is not valid on Purchase Orders or orders placed over the phone. Promotional code is valid from Friday October 27 to Friday November 4th, 2006. All prices quoted are in US dollars. Prices subject to change without prior notice.

According to their latest press release, Northrop Grumman is one or two steps closer to having a powerful battlefield laser ready for the troops.

Compact laser weapons powerful enough to perform many basic military missions are getting closer to accompanying U.S. troops wherever they go due to rapid advancements Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE:NOC) is making in high-energy, solid-state lasers, exemplified by a company-funded laser weapon named Vesta

According to the company the laser is rated to put out 15kW with an indefinite run time with no degredation of beam quality. During their demonstration they achieved beam quality of less than 1.3 times the theoretical diffraction limit.

By comparison, a typical industrial laser for welding would have a beam quality exceeding 20. Weapon system applications typically seek beam qualities of 1.5 to 2. Beam qualities less than 1.5 for high-power lasers are considered outstanding.

I last mentioned Arasor in my previous post on laser TV but it appears that once again if something sounds too good to be true, it just might be missing some parts.

Smarthouse is reporting that Arasor is facing lawsuits from several directions and even has Mitsubishi publicly wondering why they weren't invited to the very public announcement of the laser device since they're apparently (they don't know) will be manufacturing the displays used.

The Company who earlier this month rolled out a Laser TV which directors claimed was set to be the killer of the plasma screen is facing the potential of ongoing legal claims as it attempts to get Laser TV off the ground. Arasor and two of its directors Simon Cao and Larry Marshall have received notice from Nomad Networks Pty Ltd, Photon Engineering Pty Ltd, Southern Cross Lasers Pty Ltd and Dr Adam Weigold claiming that they intend to make a claim against the Arasor Group for breach of contract and breaches of Section 52 of the Trade Practices Act.

Building has begun on the facilities for the LCLS x-ray laser at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC)

The laser is expected to go live in 2009 and will produce pulses of laser light brighter and shorter than any other laser in the world.

The LCLS represents the 4th generation of machines designed to produce synchrotron radiation for scientific studies, an idea originally pioneered at SLAC in the 1970s. Synchrotron radiation, in the form of x-rays or light, is typically produced by electrons circulating in a storage ring at nearly the speed of light. These extremely bright x-rays can be used to investigate various forms of matter ranging from objects of atomic and molecular size to man-made materials with unusual properties.

Unlike a circular storage ring, the LCLS will produce x-rays using the final 1/3 of SLAC's existing linear accelerator, in conjunction with long arrays of special magnets called "undulators." These powerful devices also owe their existence to research conducted at SLAC. Because undulators produce intense pulses of radiation lasting barely a billionth of a second, the LCLS will work much like a camera's flash, enabling scientists to take images of atoms and molecules in motion, shedding light on the fundamental processes of life on an unprecedented scale.

Alright, not literally but the National Research Council Canada reports that a team of NRC researchers have developed a method of controlling chemical processes at the quantum level using laser pulses.

The team of Dave Townsend, Albert Stolow and Benjamin Sussman describe their experiment as analogous to a game of labrinth.

A player controls the tilt of a board in order to guide a steel ball through a maze of holes; in this case a molecular scale game. The knob the researchers used is an ultrafast laser pulse (shown here as a wiggly black arrow) which re-shapes the hill (or tilts the board) as the molecule is sliding down the slope, using an interaction called the Dynamic Stark Effect. In this molecular 'Labyrinth' game, the interaction deflects the reacting molecule towards valley A rather than valley B. The breaking of the chemical bond associated with this process is illustrated on the left. A key aspect of the NRC approach is that the molecule does not absorb the laser light during this re-shaping.

According to Albert Stolow, the NRC team leader, the tool used to alter molecular landscapes has implications beyond the control of chemical reactions. One example already mentioned is in the area of quantum information either to directly encode molecular scale information or to control molecular scale switches. Another application is in developing novel forms of optical microscopy of live cells, where quantum control methods can be used to sharpen images, enhance sensitivity and perhaps even perform molecular scale surgery on individual cells.

Continue reading "Controlling chemical reactions by playing labrinth"

As I mentioned in this previous article, lasers are being used in various ways to help medical patients.

One team in Switzerland has come closer to creating a method that is workable, depending on the safety and reproducability when using nanoparticles.

A team led by Jeffrey Hubbell of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) has found a way to bind water-insoluble cancer drugs to nanoparticles by exposing the two to argon laser light for one hour.

The nanoparticles have internal spaces used to trap the drugs and channels through which they can be released.

The investigators created these nanoparticles from two different polymers that crosslink to each other when exposed to light from an argon laser for one hour. They then added the nanoparticles to a solution of doxorubicin and evaporated the solvent used to dissolve the anticancer drug. Nearly half of the drug in solution became encapsulated within the nanoparticles. The researchers note that the resulting nanoparticles contain a protein-repelling surface coating that should result in favorable pharmacokinetic behavior.

Experiments to test the drug-release characteristics of these nanoparticles showed that maximum release occurred at approximately eight hours and then remained close to that level for a week. The data imply that release occurs through a diffusion mechanism, that is, drug travels through channels in the nanoparticle to the nanoparticle surface, as opposed to a disintegration mechanism in which the nanoparticle falls apart and releases drug.

Their work has been published in the European Journal of Pharmecuetal Sciences.

The Tallahassee Democrat reports that professor Lewis Johnson and his team at Florida A&M University are working on a laser system to produce plasma gases and enable radioactive isotopes to be detected more quickly and at longer distances.

In the event of an underground nuclear blast, it can be days, weeks or months before nuclear particles leak into the air and are carried by wind to somewhere they can be measured, he said. Yet soldiers seeking a dirty bomb someday might carry a portable laser in a Humvee.

The FAMU research is only into its second year of a $5.5-6 million grant but hopes that some day the technology could be used by people on the ground to saves lives.

At the moment it can take days or weeks to detect radiation leaking from the ground after a nuclear test and their hope is that using lasers, detection can happen much more quickly.

On the other hand, I hope Mr. Akpovo doesn't normally stick his fingers into the laser like he's doing above since any laser capable of creating plasma will take those digits off.

Star Wars is a bit closer.

During the "low-power" flight tests, which began Oct. 10 and conclude this fall, the ATL ACTD system will find and track ground targets at White Sands Missile Range, N.M. A low-power, solid-state laser will serve as a surrogate for ATL's high-power chemical laser.

To prepare for the tests, the ATL aircraft, a C-130H from the U.S. Air Force 46th Test Wing, was outfitted with flight demonstration hardware at Crestview Aerospace Corp. in Crestview, Fla. The hardware includes the beam director and optical control bench, which will direct the laser beam to its target; weapon system consoles, which will display high-resolution imagery and enable the tracking of targets; and sensors.

It will be interesting to see how this develops but for the peaceniks out there, don't fear as the weapon can be used in non-lethal means.

ATL will destroy, damage or disable targets with little to no collateral damage, supporting missions on the battlefield and in urban operations. ATL will produce scaleable effects, meaning the weapon operator will be able to select the degree and nature of the damage done to a target by choosing a specific aimpoint and laser shot duration. For example, targeting the fuel tank of a vehicle could result in total destruction of the vehicle, while targeting a tire might result in the vehicle stopping without injury to the driver.

That's something I'd really like to see.

Looks like another company is set to release an laser-driven HDTV set in 2007.

As I mentioned previously about Novalux, laser TV is coming and Arasor of Sunnyvale, CA is set to release a competing TV next year.

Details are slim on thier technology and there aren't any live pictures that I can find but lasers are very quickly making it into just about every aspect of our lives. The "solution in search of a problem" doesn't seem to lack for problems to solve these days.

Ok, so some Microsoft-owned guy gets it into his head to take a Mindstorms NXT sensor and hack it to give his robot slave some laser skillz.

Next thing that's going to happen is that instead of the robot taking out the trash like they thought, the robot will be leading the kid around, making him take out the trash and helping to take over the world.

It's already starting.

In the next picture, the robot's twisting the kid all over the place to make him submit. Sure, the kid looks happy, but that's probably just extreme pain from the electron ram that the robot is using on the kid.

This time it's what looks like artillery practice in Mosul.

Well, no, not any time soon but apparently scientists at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University in Denmark have managed to teleport an "object" containing billions of atoms.

The experiment involved for the first time a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms. They also teleported the information a distance of half a meter but believe it can be extended further.

"Teleportation between two single atoms had been done two years ago by two teams, but this was done at a distance of a fraction of a millimeter," professor Eugene Polzik, of the Danish National Research Foundation Center for Quantum Optics, explained.

"Our method allows teleportation to be taken over longer distances because it involves light as the carrier of entanglement," he added.

Don't look for a Start Trek transporter to appear any time soon though, they've got a lot of work left to do before they'll be able to teleport more complex combinations of atoms.

Physorg.com has reported that Cornell University researchers have developed a new method, called multiphoton fluorescence microscopy, for viewing chromosomes in action.

Using multiphoton fluorescence microscopy, a technique pioneered at Cornell by physicist Watt W. Webb, researchers have for the first time been able to watch chromosomes change their form in order to activate their genes to synthesize key proteins in fruit fly cells. The advance could be a significant step toward understanding the basic processes that underlie gene expression.

Yao used multiphoton microscopy (MPM) to image living salivary gland tissue of Drosophila (fruit flies). Unlike other methods, which lack penetrating power and can damage the specimen, MPM delivers crisp, clear images, even in thicker tissue samples like Drosophila salivary glands.

The research was ultimately possible thanks to the unique composition of the fruit flies' so-called polytene cells, giant, multistranded chromosomes with hundreds of sets of the genome instead of the usual two sets in conventional cells. This enlarges the usual nuclear dimensions by about 10 times, making them large enough to image the detail.

A visual example of the differences obtainable between traditional microscopy and MFM are available here.

Photonics.com reports that researchers at the Max Planck Institute have developed a novel method of trapping molecules in a lattice of overlapping laser beams and keeping them there.

The work was achieved by physicists at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, and the resulting shape of the optical lattice resembles a stack of egg cartons, with exactly two atoms placed into the each well of the carton. By applying a magnetic field, these atom pairs are associated to molecules. The work is reported in the Sept. 24 edition of the journal Nature Physics.

Researchers created the optical lattice by intersecting several laser beams and transferred a very cold gas of rubidium atoms, also called a Bose-Einstein condensate, into the lattice.
The laser lattice looks like a stack of egg cartons with the wells representing locations where the rubidium atoms tend to settle.

The depth of the lattice sites depends on laser intensity. At low laser intensities, the atoms can move almost freely in the optical lattice and move from site to site. With increasing laser intensities, the wells become deeper and deeper and at some point the atoms cannot escape from the well in which they find themselves -- they are trapped and localized. The resulting highly ordered state is called a Mott insulator state. Changing the overall atom number in the lattice, the physicists were able to create a situation with exactly two atoms per site in the center of the lattice.