Scientists Shatter Record with 10 Times Faster Lasers
- Thread starter Rhykker
- Start date
The context here is lacking. Of course, that's the inital press release - not The Escapists's fault.
It doesn't make sense to state that "shrink[ing] their nanowire lasers down to just 120 nanometres in diameter" constitutes a "world record speed". We can compare that to commercially available systems [http://www.thorlabs.com/navigation.cfm?guide_id=2024] which create pulses 800 nm wide, which is somewhat more helpful.
Or better yet, we can divide 120 nm by the speed of light turns up 0.4 femtoseconds. Femtosecond lasers usually only go down to 30 fs [http://www.rp-photonics.com/femtosecond_lasers.html]. (One femtosecond is to a second as ten minutes is to the age of the universe.)
Except... if we look at the cited paper [http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphys3103.html], they only talk about 800 fs pulses; the abstract suggests that the wires used in the laser are 120 nm in diameter, not the pulses.
It doesn't make sense to state that "shrink[ing] their nanowire lasers down to just 120 nanometres in diameter" constitutes a "world record speed". We can compare that to commercially available systems [http://www.thorlabs.com/navigation.cfm?guide_id=2024] which create pulses 800 nm wide, which is somewhat more helpful.
Or better yet, we can divide 120 nm by the speed of light turns up 0.4 femtoseconds. Femtosecond lasers usually only go down to 30 fs [http://www.rp-photonics.com/femtosecond_lasers.html]. (One femtosecond is to a second as ten minutes is to the age of the universe.)
Except... if we look at the cited paper [http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphys3103.html], they only talk about 800 fs pulses; the abstract suggests that the wires used in the laser are 120 nm in diameter, not the pulses.
I have no idea how this helps at all, but I have a CS professor who always says that whenever you read from disk, you die just a little, so I know faster data transfer is always a good thing. I guess this might make fiber optics better?
I'm always skeptical when I see that. Using unconventional methods of measuring has led to incorrect results in the past; I wonder how well they tested this newfangled "optical switching method" instrumentation against conventional electronics.Rhykker said:
So how fast is it??? Is it just me or is the new record mentioned no where in the article. The one piece of information I wanted was unavailable.
Here's hoping this makes for faster load/write times in the near future. I spend hours waiting for data to be moved when I'm editing these days.
Thus proving the constant-acceleration of light particles thing shown by Japanese scientists when a beam of light returned from a mirror a fraction sooner than it left. Congratulations, we're pioneering FTL travel (or at least the conventional understanding of FTL as defined by the old standard which believes light to be at a constant speed, which is not true).
