Science Focus
original post »For the first time, researchers have shown that diamond can radically improve the quality of high power laser beams, according to new photonics research published overnight in Laser & Photonics Reviews. A team from the Macquarie Photonics Research Centre have demonstrated this improvement by exploiting optical interactions inside a diamond crystal of length several millimetres long. “Lasers come in all sorts of colours and with beam powers that range from the milliwatt level we are familiar with in laser pointers and in DVD players, up to many thousands of watts, enough to burn through steel in a fraction of second,” says lead researcher Dr Aaron McKay. The device used by McKay and colleagues was so highly efficient that the brightness of the output beam was 50% higher than the input beam. However, there is one fundamental property of a laser beam that is critical to applications – its quality, or, in the terminology of physicists, its coherence. High quality lasers are needed to meet growing technological demands in applications as diverse as in materials processing, environmental and remote sensing, and in defence. Beam quality and brightness are fundamental attributes that inherently make lasers so valuable. “Standard methods used to increase
The post Diamond makes laser beams more brilliant has been published on Technology Org.
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