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adzm 11 hours ago [-]
Everyone talking about magenta and brown, but you can see an illusory color right now even without lasers! https://dynomight.net/colors/ behold, some kind of hyper-turquoise
jcul 10 hours ago [-]
The whole idea of colour and light frequency is fascinating.
These are just frequencies of light, but the subjective experience of them is so much more.
And the whole thing of my perception of "red" or what I call "red" could be very different to someone else's subjective perception. But we would both call it red and associate it with the same thing, fire, love, heat, danger etc.
sgc 8 hours ago [-]
> what I call "red" could be very different to someone else's subjective perception
It's worth noting that is true of virtually everything we know. >>This is a very simple sentence.<< Anybody who understands English, 'understands' it. But what it means to understand it is perhaps completely different for each person. As long as they fit into the same place in their worldview (Lewis Caroll's Carrollian syllogisms come to mind), practically it often doesn't matter beyond recognizing the wonderful uniqueness of each human being. Likewise, unless somebody is color blind or perceives more colors than others (tetrachromats), it doesn't matter since the relationships between the different concepts or colors will be analogous amongst most people - so a common understanding within the differences is possible. Or perhaps it is more precise to say that there are so many data points in color perception or anything we know, that despite the minor differences in relationships, we understand each other because the differences must be minimal given the practically unlimited data points constraining our perceptions. In fact, when people's perceptions of things vary too much, they can be classified as mentally ill even if they understand many things perfectly well.
da_chicken 10 hours ago [-]
I think it's important to remember that we're not perceiving some fundamental aspect of light. We're perceiving how the photosensitive portions of our retina convert light to stimulus, and how our brains construct a meaningful image from that stimulus in our mind.
Like film photography doesn't happen in the lens or the world. It happens in that photosensitive chemical reaction, and the decision of the photographer.
d0mine 5 hours ago [-]
> how our brain construct
is the only part i.e., we perceive what brain predicts no more no less. Optical illusions demonstrate it well.
Sometimes that prediction (our perception) correlates with the light reaching the retina. But it is a mistake to think that we can perceive it directly. For example, we do not see the black hole in our field of vision where there are no receptors (due to our eyes construction).
Another example that makes the point clearer: there are no "wetness" receptors at all but we perceive wetness just fine.
TomatoCo 9 hours ago [-]
It reminds me of how vinyl records are fairly lossy, but they provide a superior experience in some cases because those limitations have been accounted for during the mastering process.
It's an entire pipeline from photomultiplier to recording medium to the inverse process and everything is optimized not for any particular mathematical truth but for the subjective experience.
com2kid 8 hours ago [-]
Vinyls are sometimes preferred because people like white noise, same as tube amps.
Granted some CDs are mastered like garbage, and that led to some bad press for awhile. But you can master a CD so that it sounds exactly, as in mathematically exactly, as a vinyl record, if so desired.
It is also possible to make a digital amplifier that sounds exactly identical to vacuum tubes.
Humans have well and mastered the art of shaping sound waveforms however we want.
XorNot 4 hours ago [-]
I mean I've always thought the kinetic experience of vinyl was the point: my childhood memory is the excitement and anticipation of carefully putting the needle on the lead in and hearing the subtle pops and scratches that meant it was about to start.
The whole physical enterprise has a narrative and anticipation to it.
dotancohen 3 hours ago [-]
> carefully putting the needle on the lead in and hearing the subtle pops and scratches
Led Zeppelin III actually used that lead in as part of the music experience, and the original CD pressing didn't capture it. I've heard CD pressings (even the name remains from vinyl) that do capture it, I don't know when that started.
hank808 8 hours ago [-]
Most records these days use CDs as masters, sadly.
dotancohen 3 hours ago [-]
Are you referring to the loudness wars?
topham 5 hours ago [-]
This is true, and illusionary at the same time.
While our precise perception of red may not match, the interplay between colors is such that people perceived them to go together, or clash, etc, in a somewhat consistent fashion.
This means that, over the general population the perception of color is very similar from person to person. Ignoring genetic defects.
prox 2 hours ago [-]
I worked in a creative shop, so we sold a lot of colors of ink, paint, crayons etc.
It’s interesting to watch people trying to pick “red” when there is like a whole gamut of red. Not only that, but it depends on the lighting around as well. (Is it evening, day, what kind of lighting fixtures are there?)
Creatives usually have 10 kelvin white boxes for a neutral color experience. A bit like audio folks have calibrated monitor speakers.
jojobas 1 hours ago [-]
>subjective experience of them is so much more
It's just that our eyes kinda suck and evolution had to make up in buggy software.
awesome_dude 10 hours ago [-]
But also - colours don't exist without a name
eg. Before Orange, there was only shades of yellow or reds
jjk166 10 hours ago [-]
The colors most certainly exist without the name. You may have described the fruit as being a weird shade of red, but if someone held up something red and said "so it was this color" you'd say no. Conversely if someone held up something that was actually orange colored, you'd say "yeah it was that color."
Similarly, you may have no idea what the name is for the color of a Tangerine, but you know what that color is. You might describe it as a dark orange. If I say the name for it is coquelicot, you can look up coquelicot and see if it matches the color you picture in your mind.
davidmurdoch 8 hours ago [-]
I don't think so. Just becoming fluent in multiple languages can result in the perception of more distinct colors. And those fluent in languages that have additional distinct color names can differentiate subtle differences in the shades of colors that non-speakers cannot even differentiate. Color is less about seeing what is actually out there and more about how our brain interprets colors to create "meaning".
jjk166 6 hours ago [-]
> And those fluent in languages that have additional distinct color names can differentiate subtle differences in the shades of colors that non-speakers cannot even differentiate.
The ability to label more colors is not the ability to perceive more colors. The ability of your cone cells to recognize a difference in color between two samples is unaffected by language.
c22 4 hours ago [-]
I think you are correct, but the likelihood of perceiving probably is tied to language.
It's amazing how much time we spend on autopilot.
awesome_dude 4 hours ago [-]
You're actually further away from the truth than you will ever know.
1. Colours do NOT actually exist - they are purely an interpretation by your brain of signals encountered by sensors. Light exists at different frequencies, yes, but what colour is 2.6 GHz? What about light in the gamma spectrum?
2. While the wavelengths were always there, the concept of "Orange" as a distinct category didn't exist for English speakers until the fruit arrived. Before that, it was just "yellow-red" (geoluread) - as has already been mentioned. If you don't have a word for a transition, your brain often fails to categorise it as a distinct entity, effectively "grouping" it with its neighbours. The fruit literally defined the colour for the language.
Finally, just FTR coquelicot is actually a vivid poppy red - it comes from the French name for the flower.
travisjungroth 7 hours ago [-]
The name for the color doesn’t exist before the name. But, you can distinguish all sorts of colors you don’t know the name for. Look at a smooth color wheel or a wall of paint swatches.
14 6 hours ago [-]
I have thought about this before as well. Like maybe what I see as red you see as purple but since we have always been taught that what we both see is red to both of us it is red.
I am however leaning more to the belief that typically we all see colors the same. But it is one of those things that could never be proven.
Another interesting thought that comes to mind speaking about color perceptions is I recently read an article or post I honestly don't remember where that discussed what do blind people see like do they just see blackness all the time. According to what I read it claimed that people born blind don't actually see a blackout picture they literally just don't perceive anything. I think for most it would be hard to imagine nothingness but I could accept that as a true fact.
huflungdung 10 hours ago [-]
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waterproof 5 hours ago [-]
Any day that I learn something new about color is a good day.
Here's my favorite color factoid: There is no such thing as monochromatic pink. You have to make it by combining the two ends of the visible spectrum: somethung reddish and something violet-ish. So that means there is no pink in a rainbow, strictly speaking.
antiterra 3 hours ago [-]
This is conflating two kinds of pink. The pink made from combining ends of the spectrum is most commonly termed ‘hot pink.’
The other, very often just ‘pink,’ is predominantly a light red. A quick and sloppy way to describe this is a light grey with a raised red component.
Also, you can make hot pink without needing to use spectral violet (the ‘end’ of the spectrum) since there are combinations of blue and red that are ‘metameric,’ creating a perceptually matching response in our eyes.
matthewmacleod 3 hours ago [-]
The other, very often just ‘pink,’ is predominantly a light red. A quick and sloppy way to describe this is a light grey with a raised red component.
While that’s true, it’s also still not monochromatic in the electromagnetic sense.
wdutch 4 hours ago [-]
When I was young I was taught that pink is a light shade of red. But what kids these days call pink seems to me to be a bright magenta.
dotancohen 3 hours ago [-]
The word "pink" is derived from a name this flower had about 600 years ago:
So however you see that flower, that's the literal pink prototype.
twodave 9 hours ago [-]
FYI if you get ocular/retinal migraines like me then the exercise in this article might be a bad idea.
PunchyHamster 2 hours ago [-]
> Weird stuff will happen, but stay focused on the dot. Blink if you must. It takes one minute and it’s probably best to experience it without extra information i.e. without reading past this sentence.
well that was a waste of fucking time
greesil 6 hours ago [-]
Well this explains tripping on acid a little bit
analog31 7 hours ago [-]
I worked with a brown laser when I was in grad school. It made a couple of brown spots on the wall by accident.
fl4regun 6 hours ago [-]
very interesting, its quite striking, now I'm even more curious how this compares with the lasers.
junon 11 hours ago [-]
For those not seeing it or only seeing a little, stare at it for a while then shake your head (or your phone) just a bit.
> When it comes to information transfer and processing, light can do things that electricity can’t. Photons — particles of light — are far zippier than electrons at working their way through circuits.
Electrons themselves don't move at the speed of light, but information transfer (i.e. communication) via electrons does happen close to the speed of light.
A subtle, but important, distinction that's often misunderstood and means computational performance gains would probably come from bandwidth, not latency.
NL807 4 hours ago [-]
In electric circuits, information is transmitted through the electric field, which itself is close to the speed of light.
tempaccount5050 3 hours ago [-]
Nope, it's 1/2 - 2/3 the speed of light depending on the metals used.
spwa4 2 hours ago [-]
You're both wrong. It's true that the first whisper of movement travels at the speed of light, but the time until the flow stabilizes (which you WILL need to wait for in electrical chips) is actually slower than the "speed of electricity".
Oh and also: currently the idea behind on-chip lasers is interconnects that don't have this limitation. For example, PCIE is looking to build optical interconnects, which will do the equivalent of bringing every GPU 10x closer to the memory.
Optical computation would require that light switches light transistors on and off, which doesn't seem to be possible with this technology. This is optical computation in the sense of allowing light beams to be produced according to formulas.
Hikikomori 2 hours ago [-]
About 0.6c for cat6 cables, different types of cables can be slightly faster. Speed of light in fiber is also 0.6c due to the refractive index of the core.
mapt 12 hours ago [-]
Is there a single person here interested in photonic computing that wants to explain to the class if there's any "there" there?
nine_k 11 hours ago [-]
Immediately:
* You can pack many more different colors into fiber optic communication lines. Every color carries a few tens of GHz in modulation, but the carrier light is in hundreds of THz; there's a ton of bandwidth not used between readily available colors.
* You can likely do interesting molecular chemistry by precisely adjusting laser light to the energy levels of particular bonds / electrons.
* Maybe you can precisely target particular wavelengths / absorption bands for more efficient laser cutting and welding, if these adjustable lasers can be made high-power.
summa_tech 10 hours ago [-]
Fiber has fairly narrow windows in which it is as transparent as it needs to be to go long distance. We're already pretty good at filling these windows with conventional semiconductor lasers.
What this is actually interesting for is being able to access arbitrary atomic transitions, many of which are outside the range of conventional semiconductors (too short, usually - there's a big hole between green and red for semiconductors). That's why they talk about quantum stuff.
suzzer99 11 hours ago [-]
* Concert lasers just got a lot cooler.
inetknght 9 hours ago [-]
Concert tickets will still remain very hot though.
firtoz 3 hours ago [-]
Even with the latest updates?
> Jury Finds Live Nation Acts as a Monopoly in a Victory for States
In a verdict that could have far-reaching consequences in the music industry, the live colossus that includes Ticketmaster was found to have violated antitrust laws.
> precisely adjusting laser light to the energy levels of particular bonds / electrons.
However, the article is talking about discrete wavelengths. The device gives you a choice between a bunch of different fixed wavelengths.
It isn't actually tunable to specific frequencies.
Disclaimer: skim read article plus I know very little about the topic
topspin 11 hours ago [-]
There is there there...
The substance is they've created a way to fabricate a device that can make the optical frequencies they wish. That is useful: it means a designer isn't limited to frequencies that are economic to generate with existing techniques, which is a constraint that lasers currently struggle with: low cost, compact, efficient laser sources (the kind that fit on a chip, and are fabricated by cost effective processes,) only exist for a limited number of frequencies.
The story is typical tech journalism pabulum, but the underlying paper does discuss efficiency. It's about what you'd expect: 35 mW -> 6 mW @ 485 nm, for example.
An obvious use case is multimode fiber communication: perhaps this makes it possible to use more frequencies for greater bandwidth and/or make the devices cheaper/smaller/more efficient. But there are other, more exotic things one might do when some optical frequency that was previously uneconomic becomes feasible to use at scale.
criticalfault 11 hours ago [-]
I wonder if this could also work for (e)uv
jonplackett 3 hours ago [-]
I wondered this too - why are you being downvoted for asking?
All the difficulty to create that laser it seems fair enough to ask!
db48x 12 hours ago [-]
It’s like any other fundamental research: you don’t know how much it’s worth until people start using it to solve real problems. This is something that is literally impossible to guess ahead of time. The most abstract mathematical techniques could turn into a trillion–dollar industry (number theory begat RSA encryption which now underpins _everything_ we do).
But I will say that precise control of laser wavelength is critical to today’s communication technologies. I doubt their new techniques will be useless.
QQ00 10 hours ago [-]
Hopefully the billions money in AI will find some of its to turn this into real life applications. AI inference would love some more faster more efficient communication.
I mean, Photonic computing already got the attention of these big tech companies.
dado3212 11 hours ago [-]
I think it's more relevant for quantum computing. The ions we choose for ion trap quantum computers are in part due to what wavelengths are excitable by modified telecom lasers, because they're the wavelengths that are easiest to produce and where the most research/stability/miniaturization has been focused. If the laser wavelength is configurable to this degree then it no longer becomes a constraint, and maybe you can choose single ions with different characteristics.
Lerc 9 hours ago [-]
Not an expert in the field but it seems to me the key points are.
Generating any wavelength. (this article)
Accurately measuring wavelength. (otherwise there's no information benefit to arbitrary wavelength generation)
Wavelength insensitive holographic gates. (If they work on that frequency, and in a way that does not change the frequency) I don't know what properties such devices currently have
Assuming all of those, your ability to compute increases to your ability to distinguish wavelengths.
You could theoretically calculate much more in a way you could never detect, but then you get into some really interesting tree falling in a forest issues.
2ndorderthought 11 hours ago [-]
Depends on the cost. We already have variable wavelength lasers. We have had them for years. They are currently expensive, large, and not the easiest things to control electronically.
I have an application in mind for this technology outside of photonic computing. Again, it depends entirely on price, tunability, bandwidth of the profile, etc. My understanding of the photocomputing field is limited but I never thought the major issues were wavelength related? Maybe someone can educate me.
If anyone wants to send me one of these I would be pumped.
brcmthrowaway 12 hours ago [-]
There's a lot of people here with esoteric knowledge of lasers, because they're generally incredible devices (along with masers). Someone should be able to comment.
I wish we had a large laser manufacturing ability in the West. I would say 95% of lasers of all kinds are manufactured in China.
SilentM68 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
spaqin 10 hours ago [-]
That's most certainly good news (depending on the final cost) for ion trapping quantum computing - the wavelength of the laser they require to trap an ion depends on the molecule chosen, and most setups are expensive, finicky and difficult to calibrate, or sometimes messy if it's a dye laser.
packetlost 10 hours ago [-]
Neutral atom too. You need fairly clean light to pump atoms into Rydberg states
jjmarr 9 hours ago [-]
I'm excited for new displays where instead of RGB primaries that can only show a triangular subset of possible colours, we have dynamic primaries that can combine to show almost any colour.
travisjungroth 7 hours ago [-]
I want all the colors! Give me the full spectral power distribution!
madaxe_again 2 hours ago [-]
Promptly cooks in the microwave and infrared, and fries in X-ray and gamma radiation
Ahh true HDR
smallerize 6 hours ago [-]
That sounds cool but how do you encode the image data?
ledoge 3 hours ago [-]
That's the easy part, just use a color space with imaginary primaries (see e.g. ProPhoto RGB), or use one with real primaries that allows for negative values – e.g. Windows uses floating point scRGB for HDR, which is just linear BT.709/sRGB, but negative RGB values can be used to cover the full range of real and imaginary colors.
zh3 4 hours ago [-]
Just save pixel values as wavelength rather than RGB?
Title is misleading. This is about integrated optics that can do "computation" on the frequency of laser input using all kinds of nonlinear optical effects.
momoschili 2 hours ago [-]
I don't think so- seems like they demonstrated a supercontinuum source, which is a pretty good approximation of "any wavelength" laser. Pretty cool on an integrated chip.
MeteorMarc 58 minutes ago [-]
Where is the source? Tantalo does not produce photons, it is not like GaAs that you can pump and get stimulated emission. The Nature paper does not have laser in the title.
DarenWatson 4 hours ago [-]
It’s really fascinating electrons took 60 years to go from chip to a smart device and if photons follow the same thing then we just fired the starting gun. It’s really interesting to see tantala material takes a single laser color in and spits out to a full rainbow.
SEJeff 6 hours ago [-]
The US Navy has been working on their idea of a holy grail they have deemed the free electron laser[1]
Ha, thanks for that. It answered my question of whether it would be called a graser.
I guess the little scifi reader in me was hoping someone reserved that term for some kind of coherent gravity wave emitter though ;-)
xphos 9 hours ago [-]
I don't know to much about photonics but if they ever figure out the boolean algebra and register storage it would be really cool. You have 1 photo cpu core but just use different wavelengths for different threads running in the core. I am sure its way more complex than that but articles like this make you dream about how much we don't know
anigbrowl 8 hours ago [-]
I wonder if photonic computing with variable wavelengths essentially gives you a float type in silico.
calrain 2 hours ago [-]
So does this become a new display type? Laser TV?
spacedoutman 9 hours ago [-]
My first thought is this will be used as a weapon to bypass protections against specific wavelengths
aftbit 12 hours ago [-]
Cool, can I get a "proper" yellow diode laser from this? What's the efficiency look like?
jagged-chisel 10 hours ago [-]
The "shrinking" circle: I did as asked and clicked the image to see the animation. I saw no shrinking. My eyes did fatigue and I saw the border between the red and green become a blurred gradient.
What should I have experienced?
tclancy 7 hours ago [-]
You have to not blink too much or it resets the effect. After about a minute, the intense blue shows up around the red. And I say that as a man who has yet to see anything in a Magic Eye poster after a half century of what some would call life.
deepsun 10 hours ago [-]
State for longer. It starts shrinking only after a minute.
acd 3 hours ago [-]
Sounds useful for display purposes
himata4113 10 hours ago [-]
since the light range is so high, technically speaking as the technology improves does that mean we could end up sending petabytes a second over a single fiber optic core?
tbrownaw 10 hours ago [-]
Visible light is a bit less than a petahertz, so no.
osamagirl69 9 hours ago [-]
Would you care to explain how the NICT guys achieved 402Tb/s through a single (50km long!) fiber back in 2024 then? It seems like another factor of two would easily be in reach if they could extend their setup into the visible.
lefra 3 hours ago [-]
Fibers are not transparent enough in visible. I found about 10dB/km (to be compared with 0.2 dB/km around 1550nm) [0]. This means that after every km the light intensity is divided by 10, which is completely impractical for telecommunications.
Modulate frequencies, polarization, phase, amplitude, etc and you can send quite a bit.
ginko 2 hours ago [-]
With two of these you should be able to display any color in the CIE colorspace.
HNisCIS 3 hours ago [-]
Something to be aware of, the laser safety goggles used by lab workers, pilots, soldiers etc are based on the premise that lasers only occupy extremely specific and narrow parts of the spectrum so by just blocking those little bits, you can get a very effective pair of glasses that doesn't significantly effect visibility. Arbitrary waveform lasers cause problems here.
deepsun 10 hours ago [-]
Would I finally be able to see bright brown?
nine_k 10 hours ago [-]
It's called orange. Much like bright gray is called white, and bright teal is called turquoise.
rafram 10 hours ago [-]
Light brown is called tan. Dark and light oranges exist too and they’re not exactly the same as brown.
He says brown is perceived when you see an orange-wavelength light that is significantly darker than its surroundings, providing the necessary context for your brain to interpret it as brown.
punkbrwstr 6 hours ago [-]
How quickly can they get this in the Yuma tent
evo 10 hours ago [-]
I wonder if this is a nuclear proliferation risk--could it be used for AVLIS/SILEX?
jcims 11 hours ago [-]
Can each device vary the color or is it fixed based on how it’s built? Seems the latter?
2ndorderthought 10 hours ago [-]
I believe you are right.
pseudocoup 6 hours ago [-]
> Computer chips that cram billions of electronic devices into a few square inches have powered the digital economy and transformed the world.
Much power so chip
cheschire 11 hours ago [-]
Yes but can it do any color a mantis shrimp would like?
One of its receptors only detects circularly polarized light
But the only thing we know of, in the entire natural world, that emits circularly polarized light... is the reflection off the shell of the mantis shrimp.
Tade0 11 hours ago [-]
The Mantis Shrimp most likely sees very much like us (or birds, snakes), it's just that its brain is too small to integrate signals from just three types of cones, so it evolved a whole rainbow of cones.
JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago [-]
Huh. Anywhere you'd suggest I can read more about this?
From reading assume they mean wavelength of ~ visible light.
I too would like a microwave or gamma laser
wyager 8 hours ago [-]
The final frontier of display tech (as far as being able to elicit any physiologically possible eye response) is a pair of tunable lasers. You really can't go much farther than that for emissive displays! We're almost saturated (no pun intended) on useful resolution, so I expect color to be the next area of focus.
__MatrixMan__ 11 hours ago [-]
I'll take one in gamma please.
Retro_Dev 11 hours ago [-]
A gamma wavelength handheld laser would be cool; "and on this petri dish, we see a dot of cells instantaneously develop cancer"
__MatrixMan__ 10 hours ago [-]
At high energies I think you could point two at a spot in space and get antimatter where the beams cross (also matter, and then an explosion... see the Breit-Wheeler process).
We have a hard enough time building shipping-container sized devices that reflect extreme ultraviolet though... so I think a handheld gamma ray laser is off the table for this century.
saltcured 6 hours ago [-]
But, is there any property of that point in space you could measure by how exactly this occurs?
I.e. could you make some kind of massive confocal telescope using this effect in place of regular multi-photon fluorescence, to measure a 3D volume of space?
__MatrixMan__ 3 hours ago [-]
I just thought it would be fun to have a tiny ball of destruction that I could move around arbitrarily. What would I do with it? I dunno... maybe something resembling CNC milling? Etch "hello world" on the inside of a containiner without opening it?
As for building a sensor with it goes... I suppose you could create sources of light very far away without bothering to send an emitter or reflector to that location. Seems like you could use this to build a gravitational wave telescope that was much bigger than the earth.
Probably you could also break some rules regarding line-of-sight communication. If you want to transmit around an inconveniently placed moon you could send an amplitude modulated signal at point on the moon's side, the receiver could send a beam that was nearly at the pair production threshold aimed at the same point. The signal, where it intersected the beam, would take the photon flux over the threshold, repeating your signal from a more advantageous location. Although since we're already invoking godlike technology here... you might as well just use neutrinos to communicate directly through that moon.
noobermin 7 hours ago [-]
Just in time for the Trump Admin to cut some of their funding to reallocate money for a fraction of the Trump Arch.
wizardforhire 9 hours ago [-]
Just read the article and didn't see anything about building an actual laser… what details the article has (and its scant) its seems they took a fluorescing layer and sandwiched with a color wheel and added the additional wiring and control circuitry…
(Obviously more nuanced and interesting physics but still…)
cool and practical, but not a diode and definitely not a laser… I could be wrong and would love to be!
… now, if that setup could be drawn out into a fiber laser as cladding with a wide spectrum neural amplifying core (if such a material exists) that could maybe be something idk
lwansbrough 9 hours ago [-]
0.1nm please. It's x-ray lithography time!
loudmax 8 hours ago [-]
I was thinking the same thing. The stuff ASML does to produce a light at exactly the right wavelength is bananas. Making of stream of molten tin, and shooting each droplet with a laser, twice! Then bouncing the light through a series of super high precision mirrors to capture just the right spread. If you can get a laser to produce your desired wavelength without all that complexity, that's a major breakthrough.
guzfip 11 hours ago [-]
Very cool stuff. I regret wasting my life in software when I see other fields still doing interesting work.
analog8374 11 hours ago [-]
can they do microwave?
if you do the exact right color you can make certain things melt very precisely.
thanks, I'm familiar. But it doesn't answer my question.
Aboutplants 11 hours ago [-]
An application that came to mind is tunneling (through rock and earth). You could absolutely tune the wavelength to whatever material your drilling through absorbs best, to help ease and speed. Would need a good amount of energy but I could see that utilized in some fashion in the next 10-20 years
NitpickLawyer 6 hours ago [-]
I remember seeing a yt video about this tech being already trialed (w/ regular lasers) for geothermal. They use lasers to "vaporise" rock, in the hopes of digging much more efficiently.
analog8374 5 hours ago [-]
I think that if you can hit the right frequency, the resonant frequency for wiggling the water molecule or whatever, it can cost less energy.
So like if you can get just the right frequency you could cause a skin protein molecule to fall apart, which might be nicer than scalpels.
Maybe you could weld it too. A "protoplaser" like in startrek.
jiveturkey 12 hours ago [-]
But can it produce magenta?
ivanjermakov 11 hours ago [-]
Not every color has a corresponding wavelength, rather a combination of wavelengths.
Magenta is the Doom of colour lasers by the look of it.
staplung 12 hours ago [-]
What if I like magenta? Or brown?
zamadatix 11 hours ago [-]
Pedantry for pedantry, you're in luck as the title says they created 'any wavelength lasers' not 'any wavelength laser' so you can make any such combos you like rather than the fixed set now (if true) :p.
dullcrisp 11 hours ago [-]
Can I interest you in indigo or violet? Or a nice orange?
dnnddidiej 11 hours ago [-]
Genuine q: how close can you get to magenta with the rainbow?
nine_k 11 hours ago [-]
What we call "magenta" is the sensation of both red and blue color-sensitive cells in the eye being excited at the same time. There's no single wavelength that produces this effect (unlike e.g. yellow). The closes you can get is violet, which looks faint to the eye.
A rainbow gives you both red and blue; mute everything else, and you'll get magenta. That's what magenta pigments do when illuminated by white light (which is a rainbow scrambled).
dnnddidiej 8 hours ago [-]
It never clicked before that yellow and magenta are snowflakes to each other in this regard. I thought they were equals, but magenta is more majestic!
dyauspitr 11 hours ago [-]
Saying a wavelength doesn’t do it doesn’t make any sense. If you can perceive it visually, a wavelength is doing it.
nine_k 10 hours ago [-]
Two wavelengths do it; one does not suffice. It's like a perfect fifth can not one note.
dyauspitr 10 hours ago [-]
The interference is a wavelength too. Maybe not pure but it is one. Afaik they cannot be interpreted as two separate wavelengths and then “brain combined” when the aperture (the retina) is so small.
dnnddidiej 8 hours ago [-]
I haven't heard of a wavelength of 2 frequencies merged. It is like saying what is the wavelength if you tune to 2 radio stations with 2 radios (assume silent transmition for simplicity). There are 2 wavelengths.
redsocksfan45 10 hours ago [-]
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redsocksfan45 10 hours ago [-]
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compass_copium 11 hours ago [-]
Not very! This is on the "line of purples".
Here's a nice visualization of color perception (there are more modern ones, but we used the 1931 color space when I was working in the field). The horseshoe shape on the outside is the single wavelength colors.
These are just frequencies of light, but the subjective experience of them is so much more.
And the whole thing of my perception of "red" or what I call "red" could be very different to someone else's subjective perception. But we would both call it red and associate it with the same thing, fire, love, heat, danger etc.
It's worth noting that is true of virtually everything we know. >>This is a very simple sentence.<< Anybody who understands English, 'understands' it. But what it means to understand it is perhaps completely different for each person. As long as they fit into the same place in their worldview (Lewis Caroll's Carrollian syllogisms come to mind), practically it often doesn't matter beyond recognizing the wonderful uniqueness of each human being. Likewise, unless somebody is color blind or perceives more colors than others (tetrachromats), it doesn't matter since the relationships between the different concepts or colors will be analogous amongst most people - so a common understanding within the differences is possible. Or perhaps it is more precise to say that there are so many data points in color perception or anything we know, that despite the minor differences in relationships, we understand each other because the differences must be minimal given the practically unlimited data points constraining our perceptions. In fact, when people's perceptions of things vary too much, they can be classified as mentally ill even if they understand many things perfectly well.
Like film photography doesn't happen in the lens or the world. It happens in that photosensitive chemical reaction, and the decision of the photographer.
is the only part i.e., we perceive what brain predicts no more no less. Optical illusions demonstrate it well.
Sometimes that prediction (our perception) correlates with the light reaching the retina. But it is a mistake to think that we can perceive it directly. For example, we do not see the black hole in our field of vision where there are no receptors (due to our eyes construction).
Another example that makes the point clearer: there are no "wetness" receptors at all but we perceive wetness just fine.
It's an entire pipeline from photomultiplier to recording medium to the inverse process and everything is optimized not for any particular mathematical truth but for the subjective experience.
Granted some CDs are mastered like garbage, and that led to some bad press for awhile. But you can master a CD so that it sounds exactly, as in mathematically exactly, as a vinyl record, if so desired.
It is also possible to make a digital amplifier that sounds exactly identical to vacuum tubes.
Humans have well and mastered the art of shaping sound waveforms however we want.
The whole physical enterprise has a narrative and anticipation to it.
While our precise perception of red may not match, the interplay between colors is such that people perceived them to go together, or clash, etc, in a somewhat consistent fashion.
This means that, over the general population the perception of color is very similar from person to person. Ignoring genetic defects.
It’s interesting to watch people trying to pick “red” when there is like a whole gamut of red. Not only that, but it depends on the lighting around as well. (Is it evening, day, what kind of lighting fixtures are there?)
Creatives usually have 10 kelvin white boxes for a neutral color experience. A bit like audio folks have calibrated monitor speakers.
It's just that our eyes kinda suck and evolution had to make up in buggy software.
eg. Before Orange, there was only shades of yellow or reds
Similarly, you may have no idea what the name is for the color of a Tangerine, but you know what that color is. You might describe it as a dark orange. If I say the name for it is coquelicot, you can look up coquelicot and see if it matches the color you picture in your mind.
The ability to label more colors is not the ability to perceive more colors. The ability of your cone cells to recognize a difference in color between two samples is unaffected by language.
It's amazing how much time we spend on autopilot.
1. Colours do NOT actually exist - they are purely an interpretation by your brain of signals encountered by sensors. Light exists at different frequencies, yes, but what colour is 2.6 GHz? What about light in the gamma spectrum?
2. While the wavelengths were always there, the concept of "Orange" as a distinct category didn't exist for English speakers until the fruit arrived. Before that, it was just "yellow-red" (geoluread) - as has already been mentioned. If you don't have a word for a transition, your brain often fails to categorise it as a distinct entity, effectively "grouping" it with its neighbours. The fruit literally defined the colour for the language.
Finally, just FTR coquelicot is actually a vivid poppy red - it comes from the French name for the flower.
I am however leaning more to the belief that typically we all see colors the same. But it is one of those things that could never be proven.
Another interesting thought that comes to mind speaking about color perceptions is I recently read an article or post I honestly don't remember where that discussed what do blind people see like do they just see blackness all the time. According to what I read it claimed that people born blind don't actually see a blackout picture they literally just don't perceive anything. I think for most it would be hard to imagine nothingness but I could accept that as a true fact.
Here's my favorite color factoid: There is no such thing as monochromatic pink. You have to make it by combining the two ends of the visible spectrum: somethung reddish and something violet-ish. So that means there is no pink in a rainbow, strictly speaking.
The other, very often just ‘pink,’ is predominantly a light red. A quick and sloppy way to describe this is a light grey with a raised red component.
Also, you can make hot pink without needing to use spectral violet (the ‘end’ of the spectrum) since there are combinations of blue and red that are ‘metameric,’ creating a perceptually matching response in our eyes.
While that’s true, it’s also still not monochromatic in the electromagnetic sense.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/42/Dianthus...
So however you see that flower, that's the literal pink prototype.
well that was a waste of fucking time
Electrons themselves don't move at the speed of light, but information transfer (i.e. communication) via electrons does happen close to the speed of light.
A subtle, but important, distinction that's often misunderstood and means computational performance gains would probably come from bandwidth, not latency.
Oh and also: currently the idea behind on-chip lasers is interconnects that don't have this limitation. For example, PCIE is looking to build optical interconnects, which will do the equivalent of bringing every GPU 10x closer to the memory.
Optical computation would require that light switches light transistors on and off, which doesn't seem to be possible with this technology. This is optical computation in the sense of allowing light beams to be produced according to formulas.
* You can pack many more different colors into fiber optic communication lines. Every color carries a few tens of GHz in modulation, but the carrier light is in hundreds of THz; there's a ton of bandwidth not used between readily available colors.
* You can likely do interesting molecular chemistry by precisely adjusting laser light to the energy levels of particular bonds / electrons.
* Maybe you can precisely target particular wavelengths / absorption bands for more efficient laser cutting and welding, if these adjustable lasers can be made high-power.
What this is actually interesting for is being able to access arbitrary atomic transitions, many of which are outside the range of conventional semiconductors (too short, usually - there's a big hole between green and red for semiconductors). That's why they talk about quantum stuff.
> Jury Finds Live Nation Acts as a Monopoly in a Victory for States In a verdict that could have far-reaching consequences in the music industry, the live colossus that includes Ticketmaster was found to have violated antitrust laws.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/arts/music/live-nation-an...
However, the article is talking about discrete wavelengths. The device gives you a choice between a bunch of different fixed wavelengths.
It isn't actually tunable to specific frequencies.
Disclaimer: skim read article plus I know very little about the topic
The substance is they've created a way to fabricate a device that can make the optical frequencies they wish. That is useful: it means a designer isn't limited to frequencies that are economic to generate with existing techniques, which is a constraint that lasers currently struggle with: low cost, compact, efficient laser sources (the kind that fit on a chip, and are fabricated by cost effective processes,) only exist for a limited number of frequencies.
The story is typical tech journalism pabulum, but the underlying paper does discuss efficiency. It's about what you'd expect: 35 mW -> 6 mW @ 485 nm, for example.
An obvious use case is multimode fiber communication: perhaps this makes it possible to use more frequencies for greater bandwidth and/or make the devices cheaper/smaller/more efficient. But there are other, more exotic things one might do when some optical frequency that was previously uneconomic becomes feasible to use at scale.
All the difficulty to create that laser it seems fair enough to ask!
But I will say that precise control of laser wavelength is critical to today’s communication technologies. I doubt their new techniques will be useless.
I mean, Photonic computing already got the attention of these big tech companies.
Generating any wavelength. (this article)
Accurately measuring wavelength. (otherwise there's no information benefit to arbitrary wavelength generation)
Wavelength insensitive holographic gates. (If they work on that frequency, and in a way that does not change the frequency) I don't know what properties such devices currently have
Assuming all of those, your ability to compute increases to your ability to distinguish wavelengths.
You could theoretically calculate much more in a way you could never detect, but then you get into some really interesting tree falling in a forest issues.
I have an application in mind for this technology outside of photonic computing. Again, it depends entirely on price, tunability, bandwidth of the profile, etc. My understanding of the photocomputing field is limited but I never thought the major issues were wavelength related? Maybe someone can educate me.
If anyone wants to send me one of these I would be pumped.
I wish we had a large laser manufacturing ability in the West. I would say 95% of lasers of all kinds are manufactured in China.
Ahh true HDR
[1] https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2010-03-18-Boeing-Completes-Pre...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_laser
I guess the little scifi reader in me was hoping someone reserved that term for some kind of coherent gravity wave emitter though ;-)
What should I have experienced?
[0] https://media.thorlabs.com/globalassets/family-pages/shareda...
He says brown is perceived when you see an orange-wavelength light that is significantly darker than its surroundings, providing the necessary context for your brain to interpret it as brown.
Much power so chip
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp
One of its receptors only detects circularly polarized light
But the only thing we know of, in the entire natural world, that emits circularly polarized light... is the reflection off the shell of the mantis shrimp.
I too would like a microwave or gamma laser
We have a hard enough time building shipping-container sized devices that reflect extreme ultraviolet though... so I think a handheld gamma ray laser is off the table for this century.
I.e. could you make some kind of massive confocal telescope using this effect in place of regular multi-photon fluorescence, to measure a 3D volume of space?
As for building a sensor with it goes... I suppose you could create sources of light very far away without bothering to send an emitter or reflector to that location. Seems like you could use this to build a gravitational wave telescope that was much bigger than the earth.
Probably you could also break some rules regarding line-of-sight communication. If you want to transmit around an inconveniently placed moon you could send an amplitude modulated signal at point on the moon's side, the receiver could send a beam that was nearly at the pair production threshold aimed at the same point. The signal, where it intersected the beam, would take the photon flux over the threshold, repeating your signal from a more advantageous location. Although since we're already invoking godlike technology here... you might as well just use neutrinos to communicate directly through that moon.
… now, if that setup could be drawn out into a fiber laser as cladding with a wide spectrum neural amplifying core (if such a material exists) that could maybe be something idk
if you do the exact right color you can make certain things melt very precisely.
So like if you can get just the right frequency you could cause a skin protein molecule to fall apart, which might be nicer than scalpels.
Maybe you could weld it too. A "protoplaser" like in startrek.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space
A rainbow gives you both red and blue; mute everything else, and you'll get magenta. That's what magenta pigments do when illuminated by white light (which is a rainbow scrambled).
Here's a nice visualization of color perception (there are more modern ones, but we used the 1931 color space when I was working in the field). The horseshoe shape on the outside is the single wavelength colors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space
just kidding this is amazing