The president and CEO of nLight talks about building a laser company and keeping track of where the market is headed. Source: SPIE.
Laser Guitar
Jeff, an electronics technologist, has posted an instruction for building a laser guitar!
The Prism is, quite simply, the best laser guitar on the Internet. At least I think so. I hope that you take these instructions and not only make your own, but improve on my design!
I suppose I should clarify what the Prism is: It’s a bit like a guitar with some synthesizer mashed in. It has aspects of a theremin and a laser harp thrown in to boot. In short, it’s not like anything else, and you can use it to make some really neat sounds. Anything from cold Sine and harsh square waves to heavily distorted noise.
At its heart the Prism features a VCO (Voltage Controlled Oscillator), based around the very shiny XR2206 monolithic function generator. The octave range is selected by blocking one of four laser “strings,” and the pitch is controlled by the position of the musician’s hand on the fretboard. The musician has the option of selecting a sine, triangle or square wave. The sine and triangle waves can be skewed using a separate Skew control.
It also has two other controllable oscillators, one acting as an LFO (Low Frequency Oscillator) and the other acting as a Sync generator.
I designed the Prism to plug into any regular guitar amp, with no computer required. In fact, there is no programming involved at all in this project! It is just as portable as a regular guitar, and meant to be used at gigs or wherever else an “alternative” instrument is needed!
Here is a video showing the basic functions:
demonstrate the on-board effects:
Spotlight on Optics
OSA will start a service called “Spotlight on Optics“, which is officially coming on July 20, 2009. But there are already some content on the website. Basically, Spotlight on Optics will highlight select articles from the OSA journals and make them freely accessable through Optics InfoBase.
* Spotlight articles will be selected by OSA Topical and Associate Editors to show the breadth and quality of OSA content.
* Each Spotlight article will be made open access and be accompanied by original summaries written in plain English.
* Journal Editors will be encouraged to identify articles for Spotlight that have excellent scientific quality, are representative of the level of work taking place in a specific area, and put other work in perspective.
* Readers will be able to post comments to the Spotlight website, creating the potential for dialogue between author and reader (and among readers).
It will be a great source for finding interesting research works.
Virtual Journal of Laser
Virtual Journal of Laser is a web tool to help laser researchers follow publications from major academic journals. It automatically aggregate updates from Physics or Optics journals. Only abstracts of articles that are directly related to laser are imported into the system. By voting, commenting and simply visiting, interesting papers will be promoted and become more visible and easy to find.
It has been rebuilt, now one can vote on papers to promote them. It can sort popularity of papers with an algorithm similar to “radioactivity”. I use it for checking new papersr and see what other people are interested in.
NIF openning ceremony today
Scientists for decades have been hunting for ways to harness the enormous force of the sun and stars to supply energy here on Earth. The National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory may spark the light at the end of the tunnel.
An openning ceramony of the facility is held today. via: UC
400 W average power femtosecond laser
As reported by Optics.org, Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology (ILT) in Aachen, Germany, will unveil a femtosecond laser of a world-beating power output of 400 W at LASER World of Photonics in Munich, Germany, next month.
That’s a monumental improvement on most commercial femtosecond lasers, which produce an average output power around the single-watt level, while even high-end models are limited to the 50-100 W range.“The Fraunhofer ILT is introducing a paradigm shift in the design of commercial femtosecond lasers,” claimed Axel Bauer, head of the institute’s marketing and communications group. “Our laser module holds the world record for average output power among lasers with pulse durations of less than one picosecond.”
ultrafast laser makes light bulbs more efficient
Chunlei Guo, an associate professor of optics at the University of Rochester, had use ultrafast laser to turn any metal pitch black. Now he has successfuly demonstrate a reverse process, make metal radiate light more effectively!
An ultra-powerful laser can turn regular incandescent light bulbs into power-sippers, say optics researchers at the University of Rochester. The process could make a light as bright as a 100-watt bulb consume less electricity than a 60-watt bulb while remaining far cheaper and radiating a more pleasant light than a fluorescent bulb can.
The laser process creates a unique array of nano- and micro-scale structures on the surface of a regular tungsten filament—the tiny wire inside a light bulb—and theses structures make the tungsten become far more effective at radiating light.
The findings will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.
More from University of Rochester
Laser louts to be targeted in new campaign
A CAMPAIGN has been launched to tackle the growing problem of lasers being maliciously directed at planes and helicopters.
Follows a spate of incidents in South Wales, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) is urging anyone who sees a light being directed at an aircraft to contact police immediately.
via WalesOnline
target laser attackers
Laser targeting aircraft and helicopters has become a serious issue in last few years. Now polices in UK start equipping hand-held Laser Event Recorders (LER) to locate attackers.
Officers are now using hand-held Laser Event Recorders (LER) to gather evidence when they are “attacked” from the ground. The LER is held up to the helicopter’s window when the laser is first spotted.
The device, first adopted by the US Air Force, is a sophisticated digital camera which can detect laser radiation and take a picture of the attack.
It can also warn the police if the laser is powerful enough or close enough to cause physical damage to the eyes. There is a GPS receiver to record the location of the helicopter when attacked.
watch the video report:
