Behold, the world’s first anti-laser

February 18, 2011 By Andrew Couts

The anti-laser sounds like something straight out of the pages of science fiction. But the device could actually make possible the next generation of supercomputers, and even help doctors treat cancer.

The danger of dying from a laser attack — or, more likely, cancer — just got a little smaller. Scientists at Yale University have successfully constructed the world’s first “anti-laser” — so called because it cancels out beams of light generated by a laser rather than emiting them, reports Wired.

While a standard laser amplifies light with the use of a “gain medium” and mirrors, and emits a beam of light that shines entirely in one direction, the anti-laser counters a laser beam with a different beam that is its exact opposite. Also, the anti-laser feeds the two beams through silicon, a “loss medium,” which causes a loss of coherence in the beam, rather than an increase.

The device, officially called the Coherent Perfect Absorber (CPA), is the brainchild of Yale physicists Hui Cao and A. Douglas Stone, who took a scattering of ideas about a possible anti-laser and turned them into a functioning contraption. Their findings originally appeared in the journal Science.

Currently the CPA can absorb 99.4 percent of all light fed into it, but the research team responsible for building it believes they can increase that number to a near-perfect 99.999 percent.

The CPA built by the Yale team measures one centimeter wide. But the team says its size can be shrunk to a mere six microns.

So what will the anti-laser be used for? Sadly, the answer probably doesn’t have to do with anything resembling intergalactic battle.

Once the predicted major shrinkage occurs, the CPA could potentially be used to create a new breed of supercomputers by integrating the technology into optical computer boards, which use light rather than electricity to operate. In addition, the researchers say CPAs could be used by the medical industry to treat cancer in a way that is currently not possible.

Most importantly, the research team believes their working device should be easy to duplicate.

“For about four months it just wasn’t working,” Stone told FoxNews.com. “Part of the problem is that all experiments just have certain imperfections that the theory doesn’t have. But we kept at it, because no one had really done anything like this before. And now that it works, it should be very easy to recreate.”

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Showing 4 comments

Dan Gaul at 12:10pm 18th February 2011 Would be nice if they could come up with a way of absorbing the laser light being pointed at aircraft.
rwgunn at 11:51am 18th February 2011 My first thought was that it could be a way of transmitting solar energy captured by collectors in geosynchronous Earth orbit. Energy collected could be transferred to earthbound stations by laser, using this new technology for capturing and tranmuting the energy back to thermal energy to power steam turbines. There's a lot of energy to capture out there, but there hasn't been a economic way to get it to the planet. Of course, who knows if this might add to global warming...
Noneofyour Buziness at 11:27am 18th February 2011 This would be neat if it were used to asorb light and convert it into energy such as in solar technology. Right now solar panels are only 15 to 40% efficient in coverting light into energy. This could make the cell almost 100% effecient.
1. rwgunn at 12:04pm 18th February 2011 I don't see how this technology can improve on solar collectors directly. It requires a light source that is coherent (like a laser). The spectrum of solar energy is across a wide range and is not coherent.