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dtgriscom 6 hours ago [-]
That picture of the wafer with a rainbow of shapes is very misleading. It suggests that the various colors you see on the chip is the various colors the lasers can emit, which is wrong; it's just diffraction, and has nothing to do with the topic of the article. (But, PR people gotta PR...)
nabakin 16 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Hikikomori 9 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.
NL807 11 hours ago [-]
In electric circuits, information is transmitted through the electric field, which itself is close to the speed of light.
tempaccount5050 10 hours ago [-]
Nope, it's 1/2 - 2/3 the speed of light depending on the metals used.
KK7NIL 5 hours ago [-]
The velocity factor is usually 0.6-0.7, never seen it as low as 0.5.
And it's set by the dielectric, not the conducting material.
spwa4 8 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.
BenjiWiebe 2 hours ago [-]
Why do you need to wait for it to stabilize? You can keep changing the voltage at one end of the connection even if you have megabits of data currently in transit, without waiting for it to stabilize. Yes, you'll need to do impedance matching. Yes, that's a solved problem. Transmission lines.
adzm 18 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 17 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 15 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.
sysguest 4 hours ago [-]
> As long as they fit into the same place in their worldview
but... "same place in their worldview" model goes awry when things to slightly off course
most people are ok with calling rgb(255,0,0) red, but some will argue with rgb(200, 50, 20)
patapong 4 hours ago [-]
At the same time, there's some commonality for what words mean in different contexts. For example, even though we all have our own experiences with the concept of "dog", there's a common core where we have enough of an understanding what other people refer to as "dog" to allow discussing the concept. Likewise, for most people, dog is more similar to cat than to house.
Imagine if we could build a machine that reads a bunch of texts and tries to extract this meaning by looking at which words commonly co-occyr with other words in different contexts. Perhaps something interesting would happen...
TheOtherHobbes 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, but the qualia could be completely different and we'd never know.
For all I know you don't just have a completely different experience of red, but a complete different experience of geometry and spacetime.
Your subjective experience of vision could be a mirror of my own. But we'd both still associate "right" with the same half of the body.
You might not "feel" curves and lines the same way.
As long as everyone's mappings and weights are identical, the qualia themselves could be anything.
We assume the qualia would at least be recognisable, and they can't be too different because there has to be a common core of experience categories, with recognisably consistent relationships.
But beyond that - anything works.
This isn't a hypothetical because once you get into politics and ethics, the consistent relationships disappear. There are huge differences between individuals, and this causes a lot of problems.
da_chicken 16 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.
ChrisMarshallNY 5 hours ago [-]
If you pay attention to cats, you figure out they are fuzzy little “difference engines.” They seem to be hyper-tuned to things that change.
For example, if I move a small item in the corner of my room, the next time the cat walks in, he’ll go straight to it, and sniff around.
I have a feeling that cat’s eyes have some kind of “movement sensors,” built in. Maybe things that move look red, and most of the background looks grey.
close04 4 hours ago [-]
Even human eyes have some areas, outside the fovea centralis, that are very sensitive to motion even in low light. In the dark you will see motion out of the corner of your eye but you will only see pitch black if you stare in that direction.
The other part you mention is more interesting, I noticed it too. That must be a mechanism in the brain rather than the eye. It’s like the cat keeps a “snapshot” of that place to compare against next time it comes by. This might also explain why they take the same route all the time, maybe it gives them a good reference against the old snapshots.
ninjagoo 1 hours ago [-]
>> If you pay attention to cats, you figure out they are fuzzy little “difference engines.”
> That must be a mechanism in the brain rather than the eye
Check out "A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence" [1] by Jeff Hawkins [2], of PalmPilot fame. This theory postulates, in part, and with evidence, that brains are continuously comparing sensory input and movement context with learned models. I found the book to be mind-blowing, so to speak ...
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.
nkrisc 5 hours ago [-]
It’s an important point: all our sensations are interpretations of readings from various sensing abilities.
Which is why it can be so easy to produce false sensations of many things. It’s like tricking your fridge into turning the light off by pressing the little switch instead of closing the door. The fridge isn’t detecting when the door is closed, it’s detecting with that switch is pressed and interpreting that as meaning the door is closed. However that interpretation may not always be correct.
TomatoCo 16 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 15 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 11 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.
notahacker 5 hours ago [-]
Not to mention the wider context of starting off by opening a beautifully designed record sleeve, and the chances people choosing to listening to vinyl are doing so on a beautifully engineered soundsystem that cost as much as a car when it was released 50 years ago, or a turntable setup that's designed for them to interact with.
TheOtherHobbes 2 hours ago [-]
You could add all of that to CD. Bigger packaging for "audiophile pressings", a play ritual, extra distortion and compression, especially in the low end, limited dynamic ranges, minimal stereo separation, even a little randomness so each listening experiences was slightly different.
This is consumer narcissism. It's the driver behind Veblen signalling - the principle that a combination of collecting physical objects. nostalgia, and the elevated taste and disposable wealth required to create a unique shrine to the superior self.
Buying houses, watches, cars, vinyl, yachts, jets, and politicians are all the same syndrome.
Some people take it further than others.
dotancohen 9 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.
close04 4 hours ago [-]
> CD pressings (even the name remains from vinyl)
The name comes from the CDs being manufactured by pressing into a master mold to create the pits. Replicated (mass manufactured) audio CDs are pressed not written with a laser like duplicated ones (CD-R/RW).
hank808 15 hours ago [-]
Most records these days use CDs as masters, sadly.
dotancohen 9 hours ago [-]
Are you referring to the loudness wars?
topham 12 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 9 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.
phrotoma 5 hours ago [-]
I have seen Wiggtenstein's language games invoked to explain this "your red isn't my red" possibility, but I've never really been able to follow the reasoning.
Perhaps some philosophically inclined HNer who passes by here can let me know if this is a legit application of his ideas?
jojobas 8 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 17 hours ago [-]
But also - colours don't exist without a name
eg. Before Orange, there was only shades of yellow or reds
jjk166 16 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 15 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 13 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.
davidmurdoch 4 hours ago [-]
Your cone cells do not perceive anything whatsoever. Your brain does that part. Those who grew up with words (meaning) assigned to subtle variations in colors can tell those colors apart without a reference to compare it to better than, and much faster than those who haven't grown up with learning the distinction.
We know this to be obvious of sounds, musicians who can tell if a note is slightly out of tune when others who haven't learned how can't, or taste/smell: wine connoisseurs who can tell very similar wines apart that all taste the same to me.
You're not thinking in photons. Your brain is making up meaning from the stimulation your eye received from photons. The perceiving part is learned.
c22 11 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 11 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 14 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 13 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.
swiftcoder 6 hours ago [-]
> I am however leaning more to the belief that typically we all see colors the same.
Some of us explicitly don't see colour the same - I'm partially colourblind, and have pretty concrete evidence that I don't see colour that same way the average person does.
Turns out that while we tend to assign a binary colourblind/not-colourblind threshold to this, in practice humans exist along more of a spectrum of colour acuity (not to mention there are half-a-dozen distinct variants of colourblindness)
huflungdung 17 hours ago [-]
[dead]
waterproof 12 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 10 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 9 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.
antiterra 3 hours ago [-]
Absolutely, I had that in my draft but chopped it out along with a digression into black body radiation.
wdutch 10 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 9 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.
analog31 14 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.
twodave 16 hours ago [-]
FYI if you get ocular/retinal migraines like me then the exercise in this article might be a bad idea.
ghtbircshotbe 3 hours ago [-]
I get migraines and didn't have any problem. Bring unable to focus is more of a symptom or early warning rather than a trigger, at least for me. I'm not sure what the trigger is, maybe being dehydrated or something I ate.
twodave 1 hours ago [-]
I used to think heat/exercise was my only trigger. Then I got ahold of some of some HDR-enabled emojis and immediately started seeing auras everywhere haha. Didn’t take long to get rid of those. I didn’t get one from this article, but it felt like I was about to. So maybe not migraine-triggering but definitely anxiety-triggering :)
greesil 13 hours ago [-]
Well this explains tripping on acid a little bit
3 hours ago [-]
fl4regun 12 hours ago [-]
very interesting, its quite striking, now I'm even more curious how this compares with the lasers.
junon 17 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.
> 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
mapt 18 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 18 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 16 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 18 hours ago [-]
* Concert lasers just got a lot cooler.
inetknght 16 hours ago [-]
Concert tickets will still remain very hot though.
firtoz 10 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
mapt 3 hours ago [-]
We can tune them slightly with differences in temperature if I recall correctly, but there are limited uses for a few nanometers up or down in wavelength. If there's now a versatile multi wavelength generator for numerous specific discrete frequencies, you may be able to just cool it down to access nearby bands.
mapt 3 hours ago [-]
Didn't we already invent much of this with wavelength division multiplexing and optical routing switches, the invention that pierced the tech bubble by quite suddenly increasing bandwidth of in-place fiber pipes by ~100x during a large buildout?
(I am not an expert, but this is the narrative I've heard; I may not be using the right words)
topspin 18 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 18 hours ago [-]
I wonder if this could also work for (e)uv
jmusall 4 hours ago [-]
Probably not because EUV gets absorbed incredibly quickly by anything other than vacuum. This is why it is created in low density gas, thin liquid or solid samples (high harmonic generation) or electron clouds (free electron laser).
jonplackett 9 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 18 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 17 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 18 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.
morphle 2 hours ago [-]
The short answer if there is any "there" there for photonic computing is no, maybe.
You need to understand quantum physics[3,2]. For example, photonic computing, photonic logic does not have a switch equivalent as semiconducting (CMOS transistor) or superconducting (Josephson Junction JJ) but we have a photonic Mach Zener interferometer (MZI) and a photon detector.
Photonics and superconducting electronics is always going to be much larger in size (and therefore more expensive) than semiconductors build from few atoms.
In quantum physics photonics we have advantages like quantum impedance, you can replace wires with photon transmitters and photodetectors and thus switch with only a few photons instead of large numbers of electrons.
With photonics you can have billions of cheap low power data channels instead of high power wire bundles. But MZI as JJ will probably always be a few orders of magnitude larger than transistors so switching is not going to be better, but interferometry is.
Shorter answer still: just low power communications and information processing yes, computing no.
Bulk CMOS manufacturing is still cheaper than all the alternatives we have discovered or invented, until we learn to manufacture atom by atom or compute with single photons or electrons (also dependent on molecule by molecule self-assembly), we will stay with CMOS and Moore's law.
Just listen to David B. Millers[1] lectures [2], his lectures are a shortcut to reading all his papers[2] that explain it all, especially [3].
Email me, I'll give you a private lecture.
Your question's anwer is/was a summary of our whole lives research [4]:
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 18 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 18 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 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jjmarr 15 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 14 hours ago [-]
I want all the colors! Give me the full spectral power distribution!
madaxe_again 9 hours ago [-]
Promptly cooks in the microwave and infrared, and fries in X-ray and gamma radiation
Ahh true HDR
smallerize 12 hours ago [-]
That sounds cool but how do you encode the image data?
jjmarr 33 minutes ago [-]
The DCT of wavelengths that create the non-spectral colour.
No clue how you'd film in this format but the CGI and video games would be epic.
ledoge 10 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 11 hours ago [-]
Just save pixel values as wavelength rather than RGB?
spaqin 17 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 16 hours ago [-]
Neutral atom too. You need fairly clean light to pump atoms into Rydberg states
Is this the cheaper way to get to extreme uv lithography as from what I understand the largest bottle neck for China has been to get the exact wavelength needed to go small enough?
KK7NIL 5 hours ago [-]
No, the problem is getting a high power (hundreds of watts) and high uptime EUV source, there's no reason to think this is a step towards that at the moment.
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.
MeteorMarc 9 hours ago [-]
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 9 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 8 hours 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.
xphos 15 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 14 hours ago [-]
I wonder if photonic computing with variable wavelengths essentially gives you a float type in silico.
spacedoutman 16 hours ago [-]
My first thought is this will be used as a weapon to bypass protections against specific wavelengths
aftbit 18 hours ago [-]
Cool, can I get a "proper" yellow diode laser from this? What's the efficiency look like?
jagged-chisel 17 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 14 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 17 hours ago [-]
State for longer. It starts shrinking only after a minute.
himata4113 17 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 16 hours ago [-]
Visible light is a bit less than a petahertz, so no.
osamagirl69 16 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 9 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.
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.
calrain 9 hours ago [-]
So does this become a new display type? Laser TV?
evo 16 hours ago [-]
I wonder if this is a nuclear proliferation risk--could it be used for AVLIS/SILEX?
jcims 18 hours ago [-]
Can each device vary the color or is it fixed based on how it’s built? Seems the latter?
2ndorderthought 17 hours ago [-]
I believe you are right.
acd 10 hours ago [-]
Sounds useful for display purposes
punkbrwstr 13 hours ago [-]
How quickly can they get this in the Yuma tent
pseudocoup 13 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
HNisCIS 10 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.
cheschire 18 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 17 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 17 hours ago [-]
Huh. Anywhere you'd suggest I can read more about this?
With two of these you should be able to display any color in the CIE colorspace.
foxes 11 hours ago [-]
From reading assume they mean wavelength of ~ visible light.
I too would like a microwave or gamma laser
__MatrixMan__ 17 hours ago [-]
I'll take one in gamma please.
Retro_Dev 17 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__ 16 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 12 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__ 10 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.
wyager 14 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.
noobermin 14 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 16 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
guzfip 17 hours ago [-]
Very cool stuff. I regret wasting my life in software when I see other fields still doing interesting work.
analog8374 18 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 17 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 12 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 12 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.
lwansbrough 15 hours ago [-]
0.1nm please. It's x-ray lithography time!
loudmax 14 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.
jiveturkey 18 hours ago [-]
But can it produce magenta?
ivanjermakov 18 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 18 hours ago [-]
What if I like magenta? Or brown?
zamadatix 18 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 18 hours ago [-]
Can I interest you in indigo or violet? Or a nice orange?
dnnddidiej 18 hours ago [-]
Genuine q: how close can you get to magenta with the rainbow?
nine_k 18 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 15 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 17 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 17 hours ago [-]
Two wavelengths do it; one does not suffice. It's like a perfect fifth can not one note.
dyauspitr 17 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 15 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 17 hours ago [-]
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redsocksfan45 17 hours ago [-]
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compass_copium 18 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.
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.
And it's set by the dielectric, not the conducting material.
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.
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.
but... "same place in their worldview" model goes awry when things to slightly off course
most people are ok with calling rgb(255,0,0) red, but some will argue with rgb(200, 50, 20)
Imagine if we could build a machine that reads a bunch of texts and tries to extract this meaning by looking at which words commonly co-occyr with other words in different contexts. Perhaps something interesting would happen...
For all I know you don't just have a completely different experience of red, but a complete different experience of geometry and spacetime.
Your subjective experience of vision could be a mirror of my own. But we'd both still associate "right" with the same half of the body.
You might not "feel" curves and lines the same way.
As long as everyone's mappings and weights are identical, the qualia themselves could be anything.
We assume the qualia would at least be recognisable, and they can't be too different because there has to be a common core of experience categories, with recognisably consistent relationships.
But beyond that - anything works.
This isn't a hypothetical because once you get into politics and ethics, the consistent relationships disappear. There are huge differences between individuals, and this causes a lot of problems.
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.
For example, if I move a small item in the corner of my room, the next time the cat walks in, he’ll go straight to it, and sniff around.
I have a feeling that cat’s eyes have some kind of “movement sensors,” built in. Maybe things that move look red, and most of the background looks grey.
The other part you mention is more interesting, I noticed it too. That must be a mechanism in the brain rather than the eye. It’s like the cat keeps a “snapshot” of that place to compare against next time it comes by. This might also explain why they take the same route all the time, maybe it gives them a good reference against the old snapshots.
> That must be a mechanism in the brain rather than the eye
Check out "A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence" [1] by Jeff Hawkins [2], of PalmPilot fame. This theory postulates, in part, and with evidence, that brains are continuously comparing sensory input and movement context with learned models. I found the book to be mind-blowing, so to speak ...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Brains-New-Theory-Intelligen...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Hawkins
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.
Which is why it can be so easy to produce false sensations of many things. It’s like tricking your fridge into turning the light off by pressing the little switch instead of closing the door. The fridge isn’t detecting when the door is closed, it’s detecting with that switch is pressed and interpreting that as meaning the door is closed. However that interpretation may not always be correct.
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.
This is consumer narcissism. It's the driver behind Veblen signalling - the principle that a combination of collecting physical objects. nostalgia, and the elevated taste and disposable wealth required to create a unique shrine to the superior self.
Buying houses, watches, cars, vinyl, yachts, jets, and politicians are all the same syndrome.
Some people take it further than others.
The name comes from the CDs being manufactured by pressing into a master mold to create the pits. Replicated (mass manufactured) audio CDs are pressed not written with a laser like duplicated ones (CD-R/RW).
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.
Perhaps some philosophically inclined HNer who passes by here can let me know if this is a legit application of his ideas?
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.
We know this to be obvious of sounds, musicians who can tell if a note is slightly out of tune when others who haven't learned how can't, or taste/smell: wine connoisseurs who can tell very similar wines apart that all taste the same to me.
You're not thinking in photons. Your brain is making up meaning from the stimulation your eye received from photons. The perceiving part is learned.
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.
Some of us explicitly don't see colour the same - I'm partially colourblind, and have pretty concrete evidence that I don't see colour that same way the average person does.
Turns out that while we tend to assign a binary colourblind/not-colourblind threshold to this, in practice humans exist along more of a spectrum of colour acuity (not to mention there are half-a-dozen distinct variants of colourblindness)
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
* 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
(I am not an expert, but this is the narrative I've heard; I may not be using the right words)
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.
You need to understand quantum physics[3,2]. For example, photonic computing, photonic logic does not have a switch equivalent as semiconducting (CMOS transistor) or superconducting (Josephson Junction JJ) but we have a photonic Mach Zener interferometer (MZI) and a photon detector.
Photonics and superconducting electronics is always going to be much larger in size (and therefore more expensive) than semiconductors build from few atoms.
In quantum physics photonics we have advantages like quantum impedance, you can replace wires with photon transmitters and photodetectors and thus switch with only a few photons instead of large numbers of electrons.
With photonics you can have billions of cheap low power data channels instead of high power wire bundles. But MZI as JJ will probably always be a few orders of magnitude larger than transistors so switching is not going to be better, but interferometry is.
Shorter answer still: just low power communications and information processing yes, computing no.
Bulk CMOS manufacturing is still cheaper than all the alternatives we have discovered or invented, until we learn to manufacture atom by atom or compute with single photons or electrons (also dependent on molecule by molecule self-assembly), we will stay with CMOS and Moore's law.
Just listen to David B. Millers[1] lectures [2], his lectures are a shortcut to reading all his papers[2] that explain it all, especially [3].
Email me, I'll give you a private lecture.
Your question's anwer is/was a summary of our whole lives research [4]:
[1] https://appliedphysics.stanford.edu/profile/35
[2] https://www.youtube.com/@davidmillerscience
[3] Attojoule Optoelectronics for Low-Energy Information Processing and Communication https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=7805240
[4] Wafer Scale Integration Free Space Optics Computing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbqKClBwFwI
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
No clue how you'd film in this format but the CGI and video games would be epic.
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 ;-)
[1] https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2010-03-18-Boeing-Completes-Pre...
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