
But does it work underwater?
Enquiring shark-owners want to know.
US government boffins say they have invented a fiendishly cunning new kind of laser running on quantum dots which, rather than producing pulses of light, actually emits pulses of intense darkness. Unsurprisingly but mildly sinisterly, the new invention has been dubbed the "dark pulse laser". It works using extremely clever …
You can do anything with them but do these work like the bells of Unseen University? I mean does everything get bathed regularly in darkness? Is the sunlight sucked out of the room? Is this the solution to global warming? Point the gun at the earth to syphon off excess heat?
So many questions for our new overlord, Emperor MingMing, to answer.
Just so we're all clear, what we're talking about is not magically shooting beams of anti-light, but very rapidly introducing less bright pulses into an otherwise bright beam. In other words, it's a frikkin' laser with a dimmer switch.
We all read the article and figured that out, right?
Since the dark laser uses up energy in addition to its power source when operating, does this mean that it has negative efficiency?
Of course, I fully expect v2 to have no internal power source and only suck up energy from the surrounding environment. Might make for a really useful heat-sink.
The destructive force of a laser is in the intense and rapid increase in deltaT (temperature change), causing the material the laser is interacting with to melt and/or vaporise.
A dark laser, logically, must then affect deltaT in the exact opposite way, causing the object to undergo a dramatic freezing.
Of course, logic can completely ride roughshod over good science. :)
Somebody taped a label to a switch on the wall in my house. Says "Electrical Darkener". When it's in the "on" position, the room is dark. It tells the truth!
That in't coherent, though, and I sure can't make the room go dark in as little as ninety picoseconds.
In all seriousness, that's what this is about. It's handy to have a laser be able to turn off really fast. Falling edges are as important as rising edges.