Dragon's Eye News

Back in April I linked to a story of a man in DeKalb county who was accused of shining a laser at a police copter. He's plead guilty.

Mohammed Haghighi, 24, admitted in federal court that he repeatedly pointed the laser at the DeKalb County Police helicopter on the night of Feb. 4. He faces up to five years in custody for the incident, although he could receive probation, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney's office.

people, don't shine your lasers at other people, especially the police.

On June 5th the Messenger spacecraft used Venus to get a boost on it's way to Mercury and took the opportunity to take out some Venusians on the way.

Picture this: A spaceship swoops in from the void, plunging toward a cloudy planet about the size of Earth. A laser beam lances out from the ship; it probes the planet's clouds, striving to reach the hidden surface below. Meanwhile, back on the craft's home world, scientists perch on the edge of their seats waiting to see what happens.

Probes the clouds. Right.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2007/05jun_venusflyby.htm

A man arrested in DeKalb county Georgia faces charges of lying to federal agents. It's a bit odd since he apparently admitted to police that he'd shone his laser pointer at a police helicopter.

Mohammed Haghighi, 24, allegedly shined the laser at the craft as it responded Feb. 4 to a melee at a roller rink near his apartment. Authorities said the pilots, who were wearing night vision goggles, were temporarily disoriented as the laser bathed the cockpit glass in a green glow.

The pilots saw a man holding the laser and called ground units, who arrested Haghighi. He allegedly admitted shining the light at the helicopter.

Researchers at UCSB in conjunction with Intel have come up with a novel design for a new laser resonator.

The resonator features a racetrack shaped design that will ultimately reduce the cost of production and improve efficiency.

The integration of a racetrack laser with a photodetector on the hybrid silicon evanescent device platform demonstrates the potential to realize practical photonic integrated circuits on a silicon substrate. These two types of photonic devices are fabricated on a single active region design showing the flexibility of the hybrid silicon evanescent device platform. On-chip testing and characterization of the laser simplifies the testing by eliminating facet polishing and characterization uncertainties caused by coupling losses. We have demonstrated a monolithic laser with output powers up to 29 mW operating up to 60 C in the range of 1590nm.

As mentioned here, using lasers to cool objects is becoming common in the lab. Now researchers at MIT have managed to cool a large (relatively) object to near absolute zero.

This study marks the coldest temperature ever reached by laser-cooling of an object of that size, and the technique holds promise that it will experimentally confirm, for the first time, that large objects obey the laws of quantum mechanics just as atoms do.

The researchers are using two lasers. One to hold the mirror in place and another to bring the temperature of the laser down to 0.8 degrees Kelvin.

They still have a few hurdles to overcome before they'll be able to observe quantum effects with the mirror but the progress to date seems to indicate they are far away.

Once the objects get cold enough, quantum effects such as squeezed state generation, quantum information storage and quantum entanglement between the light and the mirror should be observable

After a year, engineers with the University of Florida, the University of California at Berkeley as well as other engineering teams, efforts to laser-map the San Andreas fault are proceeding well with the goal of completing the mapping in another year.

The work is part of an effort to improve earthquake prediction and uses a plane-mounted laser to map the fault with higher precision than ever before.

A small airplane carries a laser that emits thousands of pulses of light each second toward the ground. The pulses hit and scatter back to a sensor, allowing software to gauge the distance between the plane and the terrain, pinpointing the altitude of each target point. When combined with GPS coordinates gathered in part by ground crews, the system also allows the software to determine the latitude and longitude of each identified point.

The result: a highly accurate three-dimensional map that looks something like a photograph, although trees and other features of the terrain can be stripped off to reveal only the bare essentials on the topography.

Researchers at UCSB led by Shuji Nakamura, winner of the 2006 Millennium Technology Prize have developed a new way to produce laser diodes that put out blue-violet light.

in fact, these are the world first nonpolar gallium nitride blue-violet laser diodes.

The nonpolar blue-violet laser diodes have numerous commercial applications, including high-density optical data storage for high definition displays and video, optical sensing, and medical applications. Because of the shorter wavelength of emission in these devices, they can accommodate higher densities of optical storage than conventional red-laser based systems.

Said Nakamura: "Our initial results of the first violet nonpolar laser diodes with a low threshold current density demonstrate a high possibility that current c-plane violet laser diodes used for HD-DVD and Blue Ray DVD could soon be replaced with nonpolar violet laser diodes, which require lower operating power and have longer lifetimes.

The Gemini Observatory has been using laser generated guide stars as part of their adaptive optics program for a while but they've recently release some stunning images of the Orion nebula featuring supersonic "bullets" of gas and their associates wakes through the nebula.

"What I find stunning about the new image is the detail it shows, which was blurred out in any previous studies, revealing the structure of the bullets and their trailing wakes as they run into the surrounding molecular cloud," said Michael Burton of the University of New South Wales who, along with the late David Allen (Anglo-Australian Observatory) were the first to suggest the origin of these spectacular bullets 15 years ago. "This level of precision will allow the evolution of the system to be followed over the next few years, for small changes in the structures are expected from year to year as the bullets continue their outward motion."

The exceptional resolution of the new image was made possible by adaptive optics technology in place at Gemini Observatory. With a laser guide star as a reference and a rapidly deformable mirror for real-time correction, astronomers can compensate for most of the atmospheric distortions that blur the near-infrared image of a star whose light reaches the telescope's primary mirror. The system deploys a yellow/orange solid-state sodium laser that produces the artificial guide star by exciting and causing a small column of sodium gas about 90 kilometers (56 miles) up in our atmosphere to glow. The artificial star it creates becomes a reference star for the adaptive optics system, and allows it to determine how the atmosphere distorts the incoming near-infrared starlight.

Sandia National Laboratories has continued work on devices for scanning for hazardous and toxic materials hidden in packaging and clothing and is on track for completion of the Terahertz Microelectronics Transceiver Grand Challenge.

These tiny lasers are semiconductor sources of terahertz radiation capable of output powers in excess of 100 mW. Previously, such powers could only be obtained by molecular gas lasers occupying cubic meters and weighing more than 100 kg, or free electron lasers weighing tons and occupying entire buildings.

Lene Hau and her colleagues at the Rowland Institute for Science have done just that with a clump of supercooled atoms and a laser.

Two years ago we slowed it [light] down to 38 miles an hour; now we've been able to park it then bring it back up to full speed.

From the Harvard press release:

Hau and her co-authors, Naomi S. Ginsberg and Sean R. Garner, found that the light pulse can be revived, and its information transferred between the two clouds of sodium atoms, by converting the original optical pulse into a traveling matter wave which is an exact matter copy of the original pulse, traveling at a leisurely 200 meters per hour. The matter pulse is readily converted back into light when it enters the second of the supercooled clouds -- known as Bose-Einstein condensates -- and is illuminated with a control laser.

And for good measure, here's a link to their paper which was recently published in nature.

This is a pretty cool video of how basic holograms are made. The only part I don't like (other than the music) is when the person making the hologram puts his unprotected hand in the developer. Don't do that!

That's the story we'll hear next week.

This week we're hearing about a laser pointer that way "laid" or "placed" (depending on who is transcribing the story that everyone is repeating) on a dermatology exam table and somehow sparked a fire that caused $200,000 in damages.

Bullshit.

Kids, don't do this at home or anywhere else.

Ok, so the story goes that this future Darwin award winner was playing around with a 15mW green laser pointer one night and wondered what would happen if he scanned the laser past his eye.

At this point a meteor should have fallen on him but it didn't, so he got to start his experiment.

The leaves themselves aren't going to be working to keep the world clean and it remains to be seen how the process will be used in real products but researches at the University of Twente in the Netherlands have developed a laser process that can be used to duplicate the surface properties of the lotus leaf which can then be duplicated using current injection molding technologies.

The material used for the mold source is first blasted by a femtosecond laser to produce pits and then another pass is made to product very fine lines.

The combination of the two patterns produces a surface the is highly water resistant.

In ordinary hydrophylic surfaces a drop of water will wet the surface, which means that its contact area grows until an equilibrium is reached. On very hydrophobic surfaces however, the water will form a droplet, making as little contact as possible. This makes drops very mobile, just a slight inclination is enough to let the droplet roll away.

Another advantage to such surfaces is that in addition to staying relatively dry, they are self-cleaning. At the water falls away it will tend to take contaminants with it.

Bookham has announced that they will be demonstrating several high power laser products in their booth at Photonics West next week.

These include the following:

• Direct systems using 9xxnm laser diode bars for welding, marking, soldering, thermal processing
  and medical applications.
• Fiber lasers and pump blocks using 9xxnm laser diode single emitters for material processing, fiber
  laser pumping, micromachining and medical applications;
• Frequency conversion visible lasers using 9xxnm single mode diodes for display applications and
  biomedical instrumentation.