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Technology

Japanese Inventor Develops Practical Violet Laser 29

Posted by CmdrTaco from the squishing-bits-closer-together dept.
Clay writes "Shuji Nakamura at Nichia Chemical Industries, the company that brought us the first blue Light Emitting Diode (LED) has now developed a short wave-length violet laser. You need to register with their site before you can access the article. " As every school kid knows, shorter wave length lasers will let us squish bits tighter together.
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Japanese Inventor Develops Practical Violet Laser More

Japanese Inventor Develops Practical Violet Laser

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  • Purple? (Score:1)

    by Gleef ( 86 )
    Purple pretty.....
  • Bring in the Narn Bat Squad!
  • Hardware is one area in which I know practically zilch. (The rest of reality is the other area.)

    Anyways, could you make a multi-layer optical disk, which used both IR and purple lasers, giving you effectively two disks in one?

  • There's at least one CO2 laser (pulse-only) which emits in the VUV (IIRC)--dielectric barrier discharge pumped.
    But the point here is that we have a practical, cheap (?), small, reliable, continuous laser in the violet. Very, very nice.
  • I remember that holographic storage uses lasers to store "stuff" in little crystal-like thingees. Since halving the wavelength allows us to store four times the same amount of data on a flat surface, how much increase do you get from a tridimensional storage medium? ... I can imagine future MP3 players that play the music from small storage cubes attached to my keychain... :o)
  • Nobody else comes close in the game of squeezing photons out of semiconductors.
  • Might as well research those ultraviolet lasers.
    Hell, why not an X-Ray laser?
  • An high density laserdisk with an SGML'd archive of just about everything. (or everything.slashdot.org :-) A disk player with voice recognition and enough AI to search through it. Maybe a jack coming out of the player to stick in a phone booth for anything *not* on the disk.

    Nerd's dream come true.
  • Will a violet laser be able to restrict the movements of particles moreso than the lasers currently used?
  • This means more data could be packed into one fiber-optic line.
  • I don't know the details, but I know that violet is maybe 350-400 nm, while red is around 700-800 nm. I think that red lasers are currently used, so this would mean a factor of two (as the article suggested). But if anyone knows better than me, I'd love to be corrected.
  • Well, there are unfortunately certain difficulties with making shorter wavelength diode lasers. And those are the only kind of laser that are ever likely to be cheap enough for consumer applications.

    In the case of gallium nitride, there is a yellow luminescence that was a major problem for making lasers. One of the theorists in my research group was trying to figure out precisely what defect caused the luminescence (probably vacancies). Presumably this company figured out how to make GaN with very little of whatever defect caused the yellow luminescence.

    Diode lasers with even shorter wavelengths would have to have even higher band gaps, and then they would have to be pure enough that there are no optically active impurity or defect states lying in the gap. That would be a major pain.

  • who cares about practical? i want a purple laser pointer! nevermind green laser pointers are already big $$$...
  • The storage possibilites for this are amazing...

    Imagine a pair of those TV glasses with a "virtual" 16x9 HiDef display built in, and a little belt pack that plays mini-disc size DVD's... I would take a LOT of plane trips. :-)

    Lasers are good...

    Slarty
  • But how expensive is it to make?
    Guess I'll put off my DVD purchase...
  • Seen in the laser doppler interferrometry lab when I was in school, on a small label under the aperture of one of the lasers:

    "Do not look into laser with remaining eye."

  • I remember back in the day everyone thought holograms were the future. Now I don't know to much about em...but what kinda future can they have with computers other than replacing monitors. And if you can store data with Holograms....how does that work?
    NaTaS

    http://209.196.90.210 my normal doamin natas.startx.org is down right now :(
  • BFD

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