NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers
nist.gov
nist.gov
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.
Speed of light in the medium, not speed of light in vacuum.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> carefully putting the needle on the lead in and hearing the subtle pops and scratches
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).
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.
Tbh freshly pressed vinyl is a significant way down the food chain from new cars, never mind jets and conspicuous consumption fine art, and the demographics that buy it don't necessarily have more disposable income than the demographics with Spotify subscriptions hooked up to a mid range modern soundsystem. If you really want to go full Veblen you can probably buy an NFT to give you all the bragging rights of having signalling money to waste without the inconvenience of actually having anything to look after or listen to :)
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...
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?
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)
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.
They most certainly do. Your brain may apply meaning to the signals the cone cells send, but it is the cone cells which send a signal for one color and a different signal for another. That's what perception is.
> 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.
No they can't. There is no evidence at all of better color differentiation, and if they were able to better differentiate then they wouldn't be faster because those who were less capable would never be able to. The vocabulary makes labeling faster, and that is all that such tests are measuring.
> 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.
Knowing the names of notes doesn't make it any easier to tell if a note is out of tune. If you weren't aware before, middle C is 261.62 hz. Can you now tell if a note is .01 hz off middle C? No of course not. Musicians learn to differentiate notes because they spend tremendous amounts of time listening to sound and being corrected when the note they hit isn't the one they are going for. Similarly an orange farmer will know the difference between the color of a ripe orange and the color of a few days under ripened orange, despite not having a distinct word for either. If you're having a blind taste testing competition between someone who drinks lots of wine but has no formal education, and someone who is extremely learned in somellier vocabulary but has never actually had a glass of wine before, it's pretty obvious who is going to be better at distinguishing two vintages.
> 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.
You are perceiving photons, or more accurately the firing of neurons triggered by those photons. The meaning your brain applies is a label for what you are perceiving - it's a categorization. You see the color of an apple, you learn that color is called red. You see another apple, and you ask why that one's a different color, and then you are told there are also green apples. But you did not need to be taught to differentiate red apples and green apples, you directly perceived it. The difference between cyan and azure exists even if you don't have the vocabulary to communicate that difference to someone else.
No, it isn't. Perception is a process, and ingress only a part of the process.
Perception (from Latin perceptio 'gathering, receiving') is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information, in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment.[2] All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system, which in turn result from physical or chemical stimulation of the sensory system.[3] Vision involves light striking the retina of the eye; smell is mediated by odor molecules; and hearing involves pressure waves.
Perception is not only the passive receipt of these signals, but it is also shaped by the recipient's learning, memory, expectation, and attention.[4][5] Sensory input is a process that transforms this low-level information to higher-level information (e.g., extracts shapes for object recognition).[5] The following process connects a person's concepts and expectations (or knowledge) with restorative and selective mechanisms, such as attention, that influence perception.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception
> No they can't. There is no evidence at all of better color differentiation
Yes, there is. Example: "Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17470790/
> Knowing the names of notes doesn't make it any easier to tell if a note is out of tune.
I didn't say that. But having a deep familiarity with tones does.
> Musicians learn.
Yes, I know. I majored in Music and have 30 years experience.
> they spend tremendous amounts of time listening to sound and being corrected
I'm confused since you seems to have just switched sides of the argument completely and entirely here. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are thinking that _having_ knowledge (knowing the words and vocabulary) is what I meant. But that is not what I meant. I meant to speak about the _understanding_ you have when you intimately familiar and experienced.
> The difference between cyan and azure exists even if you don't have the vocabulary to communicate that difference to someone else.
Those colors are pretty different and aren't that interesting to study, from a linguistic relativity point of view. Colors much closer together, like #187af7, #1b85f5 and #187af7 are.
It's amazing how much time we spend on autopilot.
It's like measuring with a ruler. If you have mm notches then you'll be more likely to describe one thing your measuring as 31mm and another as 29mm, whereas if you have only cm notches then you'll probably say one is just over 3cm and another is just under 3cm. In the second case, you're measuring with a less accurate tool because you don't care as much about accuracy. Hell you may say they're both about the same size if that 2mm difference is insignificant enough. But regardless of how you communicate the length, their lengths exist and you qualitatively perceived them.
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.
It's just that our eyes kinda suck and evolution had to make up in buggy software.
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.
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.
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
Ahh true HDR
No clue how you'd film in this format but the CGI and video games would be epic.
I guess the little scifi reader in me was hoping someone reserved that term for some kind of coherent gravity wave emitter though ;-)
… 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
[1] https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2010-03-18-Boeing-Completes-Pre...
What should I have experienced?
Think of it like the phosphor on your white LED - it produces no photons by itself, but it takes in the blue photons and remits them in a different spectrum. Obviously different physics, but still a similar concept.
[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.
I too would like a microwave or gamma laser
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.
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.
Much power so chip
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.
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).
No, any wave has a wavelength. You can add sin(3x) to sin(2x) and the resulting wave is a perfect fifth. Its wavelength is determined by its components; since sin(2x) has a wavelength of π and sin(3x) has one of 2π/3, the combined wave will have one of 2π.
The difference is that sin(2x) and sin(3x) are both sine waves, while their sum is not. There is no such thing as a pure tone of two merged frequencies, but there are many possible waves at any given frequency that aren't pure tones.
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.
just kidding this is amazing