NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers

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

> 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.

Is there a single person here interested in photonic computing that wants to explain to the class if there's any "there" there?

My first thought is this will be used as a weapon to bypass protections against specific wavelengths

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.

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?

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?

I wonder if this is a nuclear proliferation risk--could it be used for AVLIS/SILEX?

Can each device vary the color or is it fixed based on how it’s built? Seems the latter?

Would I finally be able to see bright brown?

Cool, can I get a "proper" yellow diode laser from this? What's the efficiency look like?

Yes but can it do any color a mantis shrimp would like?

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp

I'll take one in gamma please.

Very cool stuff. I regret wasting my life in software when I see other fields still doing interesting work.

can they do microwave?

if you do the exact right color you can make certain things melt very precisely.

But can it produce magenta?

What if I like magenta? Or brown?

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