So, lasers. They zap things. They point out things. They’re awesome scientific to/ols, and science has just made them more awesome by making them tiny. Like, really tiny. Like, tinier than one of your hairs.
Over at Berkeley, they’ve made such a laser by using plasmons. Plasmons are created by blasting certain metals with lots of light, creating plasma. As the plasma oscillates…BAM! Plasmons. Plasmons really concentrate light, which make for great lasers, but they also burn through metal and energy like nobody’s business, unless they’re in a freezing vacuum.
What the folks at Berkeley did was figure out how to take it out of a vacuum. They did it by coating it with cadmium sulfide, a photoresistor you’ve seen on solar panels. The neat thing is, the resistance decreases the more light you hit it with. Underneath the cadmium sulfide, five nanometers away, is a layer of silver, and between them is magnesium flouride, which lets all sorts of light wavelengths pass through. Basically, the light mostly sticks between the silver and cadmium.
And it does it at room temperature, which means these tiny little lasers are suddenly easy to use.
What are the implications? Think about everything that uses a laser, from medical scanning to CDs. Now scale it down. Yeah. More powerful data storage, biomedical scanners that can go through a sample molecule by molecule, faster laser circuits…in short, this is kind of a big deal.
The Future: It Kicks Major Butt.
[ via the focused light at io9 ]