The laser — a 50-year-old invention now used in everything from CDs to laser pointers — has met its match in the “antilaser,” the first device capable of trapping and cancelling out laser beams.
While such a device would seem most fitting in a science fiction movie, its real-world application will likely be in next-generation, optical computers, which will be powered by light in addition to electrons, US researchers said on Thursday. “It’s a device which basically works like running a laser backwards,” A. Douglas Stone of Yale University, who published his findings in the journal Science, said in a telephone interview.
While a laser takes in electrical energy and emits light in a very narrow frequency range, Stone said, his antilaser takes in laser light and transforms it into heat energy. But it could be easily converted into electrical energy, he said.
Conventional lasers, which were invented in 1960, use a so-called “gain medium,” such as a semiconductor material, to produce a focused beam of light waves. Stone’s device uses silicon as an absorbent “loss-medium” that traps light waves, which bounce around until they are converted into heat.
—Reuters