A couple of weeks ago, I announced a contest to determine the Most Amazing Laser Application. What with one thing and another, this didn't get posted last week, but I don't intend to drop it completely, and will be finishing the series up in the next week or so. Here's the list of finalists, with links to those already written up:
- Cat toy/ dog toy/ laser light show
- Laser cooling/ BEC
- Lunar laser ranging
- Optical tweezers
- Optical storage media (CD/DVD/Blu-Ray)
- LIGO
- Telecommunications
- Holography
- Laser ignited fusion
- Laser eye surgery
- Laser frequency comb/ spectroscopy
- Laser guide stars/ adaptive optics
Application #5 should appear later today, with the rest to follow soonish.
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It is my duty as a blogger to mention lasers in this time of international laser celebration. This May is the 50th anniversary of the first lasers. Everyone knows a laser that they love, right? We all use them.
Voting has closed on the Laser Smackdown poll, with 772 people recording their opinion on the most amazing of the many things that have been done with lasers in the fifty years since the invention of the first working laser (see the Laserfest web site for more
I haven't posted much about life in the lab lately, because even though I'm getting to spend a bit of time in the lab, I've been so fried from this past term that I haven't had much energy for blogging.
In 1960, the first working laser was demonstrated, and promptly dubbed "a solution looking for a problem." In the ensuing fifty years, lasers have found lots of problems to solve, but there has been no consensus about which of the many amazing applications of lasers is the most amazing.