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Dario Izzo

Have We Detected Megastructures Built By Aliens Around A Distant Star? | Popular Science - 7 views

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    Really? Is this what we were all waiting for?
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    Reminds me of this - the discovery of the LGM-1 (LGM= Little Green Men indeed): http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200602/history.cfm It turned out to be the first discovery of a pulsar, re-compensated by a Nobel Prize in Physics
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    next GTOC idea?
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    Guys in SETI have come out with a precision setup to analyze if we have found the true Death Star: http://phys.org/news/2015-12-extraterrestrial-laser-pulses-kic-seti.html Conclusions are no laser light coming out from there..
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    to be honest, while the alien megastructure is a cookie idea, I highly doubt that those aliens woke up one day and thought: "hm, let's send laser pulses at this particular random spot in space sometime in the next 6 days".
Lionel Jacques

Laser-wielding satellite swarm to deflect asteroids - 2 views

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    "The latest idea comes from engineers at Glasgow's University of Strathclyde who suggest that a swarm of laser-wielding satellites could nudge Earth-bound asteroids off their collision course.... One proposed deflection technique involves using lasers to pulverize the surface of the asteroid, ejecting tiny bits of rock that would act as a propellant and push it onto a different course."
santecarloni

Laser gyroscope measures the Earth's 'wobble' - physicsworld.com - 2 views

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    An international team of researchers have developed a new type of gyroscope that is the first to measure the "wobble" in the rotational axis of the Earth from a ground-based laboratory. Astronomers normally track this wobble by continuously monitoring the position of distant objects, such as quasars. But this new method will provide a much simpler and cheaper alternative to these large-scale astronomical readings, the scientists claim.
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    is this of any use for spacecraft?
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    mmm it's like saying that you can replace satellite tracking by accelerometers on-board satellites... for Leo: you'd better put an atomic gyro on a spacecraft these laser gyro are huge !
Thijs Versloot

Laser fusion reactor inches closer to ignition #NIF - 2 views

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    a point called plasma/fuel break-even is reached where the energy released is higher than the power absorbed by the pellet. Of course, to produce 192 high power lasers does also have an efficiency. Thats why 'machine break-even' or even 'grid break-even' is more important and still quite a long way off. It does show that laser fusion is catching up quickly, although with serious bumps along the road.
Thijs Versloot

Stimulated mutual annihilation: How to make a gamma-ray laser with positronium - 1 views

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    Theorists expect that positronium, a sort of 'atom' consisting of an electron and an anti-electron, can be used to make a powerful gamma-ray laser. Scientists now report detailed calculations of the dynamics of a positronium BEC. This work is the first to account for effects of collisions between different positronium species.
jcunha

New methods to make longer streams of plasma with greater longevity could lead to laser... - 0 views

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    More developments in the laser filamentation community. Makes me wonder again about Christophe's ideas for a space-formed filament as new and efficient microwave waveguide.
jcunha

Nature: Spawning rings of exceptional points out of Dirac cones - 3 views

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    Dirac cones, a band-structure of two cones touching each other, are the key to understand graphene exceptional properties. They also appear in the theory of photon waveguides and atoms in optical lattices. In here, the study of a Dirac cone deformation in an open system (a system that is perturbed by external agents) lead to the deformation of the Dirac cone, meaning a change in the fundamental properties of the system. This change is such that strange phenomena such as unidirectional transmission or reflection or lasers with single mode (really single) operation can be achieved. Proved experimentally in photonic crystals. New way for extremely pure lasers?
duncan barker

Optics InfoBase - Ultrathin, metamaterial-based laser cavities - 0 views

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    I'm not sure if meta materials can be used to enhance lasers in space........Leopold
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    well .... will have to read this more carefully, but it seems, why not, no principal difference in space on this aspect ... any idea on this José? (in case you read this, which I doubt very much) - or maybe Luzi?
pacome delva

Tiny Laser Could Light the Way to New Microchip Technology -- Cho 2009 (831): 2 -- Scie... - 0 views

  • The nanometer-sized gizmo could provide a key tool for researchers trying to develop a new type of microchip technology called "plasmonics" that mixes electronics and optics.
  • The channel in Zhang's device measures as little as 40 nanometers wide by 5 nanometers high, far smaller than the roughly 250-nanometer diameter of a conventional laser of a similar wavelength.
  • Some physicists and engineers are hoping to build nanocircuits that manipulate plasmonics to marry high-speed electronics and high-speed optics.
LeopoldS

Access : Coherent emission of light by thermal sources : Nature - 0 views

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    how "large" could these distances be? - ready for SPS?
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    I don't think that the distance is the important criteria... It seems that the directivity is of the order of a laser one, so the divergence will be equivalent. Perhaps the important criteria is that the cost of these type of light sources could be cheaper...? and also perhaps what power transmission is achievable? It seems also that now that this concept could be used for to focus cheap lasers, instead of using complex optics in cd-rom players, etc... see http://news.softpedia.com/news/Highly-Directional-Semiconductor-Laser-Created-at-Harvard-90839.shtml
LeopoldS

1MW Solar Powered Laser Made in Uzbekistan | Solar Power | The Green Optimistic - 0 views

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    like in the french Pyrenees at Odeillo ... but with an announced SPS purpose ...
santecarloni

[1101.6015] Radio beam vorticity and orbital angular momentum - 1 views

  • It has been known for a century that electromagnetic fields can transport not only energy and linear momentum but also angular momentum. However, it was not until twenty years ago, with the discovery in laser optics of experimental techniques for the generation, detection and manipulation of photons in well-defined, pure orbital angular momentum (OAM) states, that twisted light and its pertinent optical vorticity and phase singularities began to come into widespread use in science and technology. We have now shown experimentally how OAM and vorticity can be readily imparted onto radio beams. Our results extend those of earlier experiments on angular momentum and vorticity in radio in that we used a single antenna and reflector to directly generate twisted radio beams and verified that their topological properties agree with theoretical predictions. This opens the possibility to work with photon OAM at frequencies low enough to allow the use of antennas and digital signal processing, thus enabling software controlled experimentation also with first-order quantities, and not only second (and higher) order quantities as in optics-type experiments. Since the OAM state space is infinite, our findings provide new tools for achieving high efficiency in radio communications and radar technology.
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    It has been known for a century that electromagnetic fields can transport not only energy and linear momentum but also angular momentum. However, it was not until twenty years ago, with the discovery in laser optics of experimental techniques for the generation, detection and manipulation of photons in well-defined, pure orbital angular momentum (OAM) states, that twisted light and its pertinent optical vorticity and phase singularities began to come into widespread use in science and technology. We have now shown experimentally how OAM and vorticity can be readily imparted onto radio beams. Our results extend those of earlier experiments on angular momentum and vorticity in radio in that we used a single antenna and reflector to directly generate twisted radio beams and verified that their topological properties agree with theoretical predictions. This opens the possibility to work with photon OAM at frequencies low enough to allow the use of antennas and digital signal processing, thus enabling software controlled experimentation also with first-order quantities, and not only second (and higher) order quantities as in optics-type experiments. Since the OAM state space is infinite, our findings provide new tools for achieving high efficiency in radio communications and radar technology.
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    and how can we use this?
Thijs Versloot

Laser link offers high-speed delivery - 0 views

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    New technology demonstration of laser communication link to offer high-speed near real time delivery of data from space... Oh, that's us... :)
LeopoldS

Boeing Patents a Force Field System to Block Explosions - 2 views

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    looks like an application of laser filamentation ...
jcunha

'Superman memory crystal' that could store 360TB of data forever | ExtremeTech - 0 views

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    A new so called 5D data storage that could potentially survive for billions of years. The research consists of nanostructured glass that can record digital data in five dimensions using femtosecond laser writing.
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    Very scarce scientific info available.. I'm very curious to see a bit more in future. From https://spie.org/PWL/conferencedetails/laser-micro-nanoprocessing I made a back of envelop calc: for 20 nm spaced, each laser spot in 5D encryption encodes 3 bits (it seemed to me) written in 3 planes, to obtain the claimed 360TB disk one needs very roughly 6000mm2, which does not complain with the dimensions shown in video. Only with larger number of planes (order of magnitude higher) it could be.. Also, at current commercial trends NAND Flash and HDD allow for 1000 Gb/in2. This means a 360 TB could hypothetically fit in 1800mm2.
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    I had the same issue with the numbers when I saw the announcement a few days back (https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2016/02/5d-data-storage-update.page). It doesn't seem to add up. Plus, the examples they show are super low amounts of data (the bible probably fits on a few 1.44 MB floppy disk). As for the comparison with NAND and HDD, I think the main argument for their crystal is that it is supposedly more durable. HDDs are chronically bad at long term storage, and also NAND as far as I know needs to be refreshed frequently.
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    Yes Alex, indeed, the durability is the point I think they highlight and focus on (besides the fact the abstract says something as the extrapolated decay time being comparable to the age of the Universe..). Indeed memories face problems with retention time. Most of the disks retain the information up to 10 years. When enterprises want to store data for longer times than this they use... yeah, magnetic tapes :-). Check a interesting article about magnetic tape market revival here http://www.information-age.com/technology/data-centre-and-it-infrastructure/123458854/rise-fall-and-re-rise-magnetic-tape I compared for fun, to have one idea of what we were talking about. I am also very curious so see the writing and reading times in this new memory :)
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    But how can glass store the information so long? Glass is not even solid?!
jcunha

Silicon chip with integrated laser: Light from a nanowire - 2 views

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    A nanolaser, a thousand times thinner than a human hair.
santecarloni

NC State News :: NC State News and Information » Researcher Finds Faster, Che... - 0 views

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    A North Carolina State University researcher has developed a more efficient, less expensive way of cooling electronic devices - particularly devices that generate a lot of heat, such as lasers and power devices.
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