The most powerful laser ever created is “Sound Laser”

Tiny floating beads are the core of an unprecedentedly bright laser that fires particles of sound instead of light.

Just as light rays are made up of many particles called photons, sound is also made up of particle-like clumps called phonons. For decades, researchers have created “phonon lasers” that output these particles in narrow beams, similar to the way optical lasers emit photons.

Now, Hui Jin Researchers at Hunan Normal University in China have developed the brightest phonon laser ever.

The heart of their device was a silica bead about the size of a typical bacterium, roughly micrometers long. They used two beams of light to levitate a bead and surrounded it with a reflective cavity. The tiny vibrations of this bead generated phonons, which were captured and amplified within the cavity. This continued until there were enough phonons to form a laser-like beam.

Several research groups had previously tested similar designs. But Jin and his colleagues added electrodes directly beneath the beads to generate carefully selected electromagnetic signals. This modification increased the laser’s “brightness” (the amount of power delivered at each phonon frequency) by a factor of 10, making the beam tighter and longer lasting. Previous devices developed by Jin’s team and others could only operate for a few minutes, but the latest phonon lasers can operate for more than an hour.

Because phonons are less affected by traveling through liquids, they may be more effective than traditional lasers for imaging water tissue in biomedicine and some deep-sea monitoring devices, Jin said. To tell.

But Richard North Researchers from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands say the current experimental setup is too complex, requiring precise alignment of all components. Phonon lasers can require years of research and engineering before they can match the usefulness of comparable optical lasers.

“Given the impact optical lasers have had on modern life, there is excitement about phonon lasers, but only time will tell if they will have a comparable impact,” he says.