Photonic Products laser blog

The YouTube Challenge!! Win a Spyder III laser now!!

The videos are in!

Wicked Lasers’ staff have selected what we feel are the 10 best video entries for the YouTube Challenge.

Here is your chance to vote for your favorite Wicked Lasers video produced by your very own Laser Community members.

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NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander returned more detailed images from the Red Planet and was using some of its instruments, including a robotic arm and a Canadian laser, for scientific tasks.

An image captured by the robotic-arm camera from underneath the lander may be of ice that was exposed when soil was blown away during the spacecraft’s landing last Sunday, NASA scientists said in a release Friday.

“We could very well be seeing rock, or we could be seeing exposed ice in the retrorocket blast zone,” said Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., who is the robotic arm’s co-investigator. “We’ll test the two ideas by getting more data, including colour data, from the robotic-arm camera.”

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Researchers in Japan have shown that a train of femtosecond laser pulses can cause heart muscle cells to contract and synchronize to the laser exposure. This optical pacemaker effect could provide crucial insights into abnormal heart rhythms and be combined with anti-fibrillation drugs to understand these effects at the cellular level. (Optics Express 16 8604)

“Calcium regulates the contraction of cardiomyocytes (heart muscle cells),” Nicholas Smith from Osaka University told optics.org. “We knew that if we could artificially perturb the calcium levels in the cell, we could control the beating and change its frequency. We used periodic femtosecond laser irradiation to synchronize the cell beat frequency and effectively create a laser pacemaker for the cells.”

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Although many devices based on organic-molecule-based semiconductors or plastics have been developed such as organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) for displays and lighting, field effect transistors for electrical circuits, and photodiodes for solar energy conversion and light detection, plastic laser diodes remain the only major device type not yet demonstrated until now.

One of the main stumbling blocks is that it was widely considered that plastic semiconductor laser diodes would be impossible to produce because scientists had not found or developed any plastics that could sustain a large enough current whilst also supporting the efficient light emission needed to produce a laser beam.

But this was before researchers at Imperial College (London, England) published their findings regarding a new plastic material in Nature Materials in April.

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Backed by industry and the European Commission, the ‘Brighter’ project is delivering powerful 635 and 650 nm laser diodes for medical applications as the first of its many goals.

“A laser-guided silver bullet to certain forms of cancer,” is how Eric Larkins describes photodynamic therapy – the treatment in which cancer drugs are activated by light. Despite this powerful description, laser-activated photodynamic therapy (PDT) systems are limited by commercially available diode laser technologies, most of which were developed for CD players and telecom applications.

“The problem that doctors have is actually getting the wavelength and the powers that they need, as power is directly related to dosage,” explained Larkins, the spokesperson for a multimillion euro research project called Brighter.

Now, Brighter is promising to boost the effectiveness of PDT, with high-power 635 and 650 nm diodes primed for manufacture.

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Reading about a “random laser” for the first time, you might wonder whether this term refers to the laser in your CD player which plays the song titles in the random shuffle mode. In physics, however, “random lasers” refer to a class of microlasers which use the principle of random light scattering as an integral part of the laser operation.

In conventional lasers light is trapped between two highly reflecting mirrors where it is amplified by pumping from outside. Only when this amplification process is efficient enough, the laser begins to operate.

After the initiation of the modern study of random lasers by Nabil M. Lawandy (Brown University), it was demonstrated by Hui Cao (Northwestern/Yale) and coworkers that you don’t necessarily require elaborate mirrors to confine light long enough for lasing from micron sized devices.

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Doctors specialising in cosmetic treatments are warning of a growing problem of “cowboy clinics” using lasers without proper training or controls and endangering patients.

The British Association of Cosmetic Doctors (BACD) is demanding tighter regulation of the beauty industry to protect the public. But the Department of Health has ignored the warnings and announced plans to deregulate the use of lasers in cosmetic treatment.

The government proposals, which are out for consultation until June, mean high street beauty clinics offering laser treatment will no longer have to register with the Healthcare Commission, the health inspectorate, and will not be subject to regular inspection.

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Scientists at the University of Konstanz in Germany and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (Nist) in the US have developed an ultra-fast laser that could be used to search for Earth-like planets orbiting distant stars.

The device offers a record combination of high speed, short pulses and high average power.

When combined with a frequency comb, an ultra-precise technique for measuring different colours of light, it is estimated that it can boost the sensitivity of astronomical tools searching for other Earth-like planets as much as 100 fold.

The laser emits 10 billion pulses per second, each lasting about 40 femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second) with an average power of 650 milliwatts.

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That’s Not A Moon, It’s a Laser Camera - Radiohead Shoot “House of Cards” Video

Thom & Co. recently managed to find some downtime during their US jaunt to shoot a video for the NBA-friendly In Rainbows number, “House of Cards”, in West Palm Beach, Florida.

In a somewhat predictable move by Radiohead standards (who are never ones to execute anything by what lesser bands would know as “conventional methods”), the video was shot not by a camera, but reportedly by lasers. Yes, lasers.

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A laser-generated optical comb might sound like something Flash Gordon would use to straighten his hair. It’s actually a super precise measuring device, able to find the frequency of radiation more accurately than any other method.

That might sound less exciting than a new kind of paint-dryer, but has applications in little things like the measurement of time, probing the fundamental constants of the universe, and finding other planets.  You know, small stuff.

Every light source, radio signal or cosmic ray we encounter has a frequency - find the frequency and you have information about the radiation.

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