Lasers As Fast As Possible
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2016-05-06
·
920 words · ~4 min read
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lasers they can be found in everything from grocery store scanners and printers
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to lethal alien blasting weapons and
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ill-tempered sharks to protect your freaking evil layer okay the last two
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are science fiction but lasers were originally developed for scientific
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applications that were very much real it was all the way back in 1917 that the
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illustrious Albert Einstein published a paper containing the underlying science
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that would allow light to be Amplified enough to form a laser beam but it
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wasn't until the late 1950s that the idea really took off with the first ever
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laser being turned on in 1960 it didn't take long then for people
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to find real applications for lasers as the laser was used to treat an eye
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patient the very next year and then by 1969 we were using lasers to estimate
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the distance to the Moon but how do lasers generate powerful enough light
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for these cool uses the idea basically boils down to the way electrons that
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spin around the nuclei of atoms behave you see electrons can gain or lose
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energy in a number of ways which can happen if light hits them inside of a
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laser a powered lamp flashes and the light from this flash energizes or
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excites electrons in a material called a gain medium some of these excited
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electrons spontaneously lose their energy and in the process give off a
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photon an extremely tiny unit of light the photons then hit other excited
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electrons causing more and more photons to be released which travel at exactly
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the same angle and phase as the original Photon eventually enough inphase photons
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will bounce back and forth off of two mirrors on either side of the laser and
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shine through one mirror which is semi-transparent forming a laser beam
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that you can use to play with your cat laser beams are powerful due to the way
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the internals amplify the light and they're narrow due to the fact that the
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photons are coherent or in phase and
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although the first laser was that familiar red col
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these days we can produce many different colors of laser light by using different
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gain media different materials will emit different wave lengths of light and also
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need different amounts of energy to excite their electrons both the costs of
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these various materials and their different energy requirements contribute
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to the fact that some colors of laser are more expensive than others with red
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typically being the most readily available and cheapest and with
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advancements in laser design it's become one of the most versatile pieces of
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Technology invented in the last 100 years high energy lasers have made it
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possible to cut things with light alone send data over very long distances
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through fiber optic lines identify fingerprints with Precision at crime
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scenes and even remove embarrassing body hair we're seeing other cool stuff too
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like Facebook Aquilla an experimental drone that transmits data at very high
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bandwidth using laser light and of course we'd be remiss if we didn't
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mention the humble optical drive which while it might be on its way out really
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got people thinking about the benefits of using lasers to store access and send
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information but if lasers have been around for over half a century why then
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don't we have cool weapons like the phasers from Star Trek well the main
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hurdles to a real life laser guns are power we just haven't gotten energy
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sources powerful enough to weaponize lasers shrunk down to any kind of
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practical size and efficiency as lasers
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strong enough to cause physical damage are susceptible to overheat heating
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however active Research into directed energy weapons has made some progress in
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recent years just don't hold your breath waiting for someone to turn the moon
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into oh I don't know a space station
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speaking of directed things what if there was a way for people to easily
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direct their online payments to you how about brain tree if you're building a
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mobile app and searching for a simple payment solution their brain tree v.0
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SDK is one amazingly simple integration that gives you every way to pay
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developers around the world have embraced the brain tree v.0 SDK as the
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easiest way to add secure mobile payments to their apps and websites
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brain tree allows you to accept Apple pay Android pay PayPal venmo credit
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cards and even Bitcoin and if something new pops up brain tree will support that
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too it's used by Uber Airbnb and GitHub
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so yeah it's pretty darn scalable but let's say you're not looking to take on
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Uber tomorrow but you want to try out brain free no worries you can even get
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your first $50,000 in transactions fee
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free at brain Tre payments.com tequ
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Linked In the video description go check it out so thanks for watching guys if
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