NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers

Speed of light in the medium, not speed of light in vacuum.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Vrhk5OjBP8

Good discussion in the comments there as well.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I guess the little scifi reader in me was hoping someone reserved that term for some kind of coherent gravity wave emitter though ;-)

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space