Tag Archives: lasers

Private Enterprise

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The Little Prince - pic from Wikipedia

A mention for some of the optics and photonics stories I’ve covered lately:

The B612 Foundation is raising funds for what would be the first privately funded deep space mission, putting its own infrared observatory into orbit around the Sun at roughly the orbital distance of Venus. Ambitious, is probably the appropriate word. B612 are campaigners on the topic of asteroid deflection, and having spotted that NASA isn’t going to complete the mapping of potentially hazardous bodies in the inner solar system to its satisfaction any time soon, it wants to get out there and start having a look itself. A space mission funded by a private organisation with something of an evangelical approach to a certain catastrophic turn of events has some pop-cultural bite about it, and the Foundation rather smartly takes its name from the asteroid in The Little Prince, so my dream of one day writing about the ground-breaking efforts of the Acme Corporation and Roxxon Oil is back on track.

The dietary habits of a hominin who lived in South Africa two million years ago have been figured out, by analysing carbon dioxide lasered out of his tooth enamel. Turns out he was picky. My take-away from this is that I have the wrong idea entirely about the fragility of tooth enamel.

A system at Palomar Observatory should be able to yield direct optical evidence of the presence of exoplanets orbiting other stars, rather than relying on indirect detection of changes in starlight or gravitational effects. This ultimately revolves around getting the speckle caused by the atmosphere out of the picture, using the first “extreme” adaptive optics system deployed for astronomy. They know their AO tech at Palomar, and reckon they might eventually be able to achieve Hubble-calibre resolution from the ground.

Keeping unmanned drone aircraft in the air for longer used to mean installing bigger batteries, but somehow recharging the ones they’ve already got without needing them to land might be a better bet. Shooting a laser at them from the ground and re-juicing a drone that way sounds fairly simple; in principle it ties back into the ideas of wireless power transmission that used to keep Nikola Tesla awake at night, and which then kept a lot of other people awake when he explained to them what he meant. Lockheed Martin and LaserMotive have made it work in a wind tunnel, but the technical bottleneck might be the cells on the drone that turn an incoming laser into electricity, tech which has not been particularly high on anyone’s research program lately.

Ride that switchback

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Three months ago the US laser sector was pondering the need to stock up on canned food and shotguns, but the sky remains un-fallen for the only reason that matters: on the whole demand has failed to collapse.

There’s a large pile of caveats. Concentrating on the year-on-year figures helps avoid the headache that reading the sequential numbers causes; heavy industry is still more inclined to put money on the table than the technology sector; exporters will fret that the Eurozone and US economies are heading in different directions again, although probably not as much as Europeans will. But most vendors are still optimistic, the latest stage of the ride that’s as unrelenting for them as it is for the analysts asking about it.

So I asked an analyst about it. The latest of my regular chats with Mark Douglass of Longbow Research about what’s going on is now posted online at Optics.org.

Summer of discontent

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So the unalloyed good news didn’t stay pure for long. In April the US optics and laser sector was not only happy to find itself recovering, but daring to use words like “optimistic” and “robust.” Since then: complete mayhem.

I spoke to Mark Douglass of Longbow Research for Optics.org, and discussed why the clouds were gathering in July even before the storm broke in August. This time it includes words like “clear as mud.”

Numbers game

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the delicate work of stem cell injection. photo: J. Michael White, Washington University School of Medicine.

One of the more modest notable features of stem cell research is the contrast in numbers. Researchers perform precise and exacting microsurgery on individual cells, prizing minute openings in the membranes of eight-cell embryos so that stem cells can be introduced through the gap. And to prepare, they carry out large-scale housekeeping operations on cultures containing millions of cells, ablating and scoring and where necessary destroying them in bulk. The pattern holds for fertility studies and IVF too.

If the same basic kit could do both kinds of operation, things would not only go faster but be cheaper too. Hamilton Thorne has designed a family of microscope objectives that incorporate miniaturized laser diodes but still fit into standard laboratory kit. Pick the right one, and your microscope has just acquired a laser powerful enough to do the housekeeping or delicate enough to do the prizing.

My chat with the company for Optics.org about the goal of making lab-scale eye-safe lasers a practical proposition for cell biologists, and the small matter of a $1.3 billion market sector to be tapped, is here.