After 60 Years, a Room-Temperature Maser 102
gbrumfiel writes "Before there were lasers, there were masers: systems that amplified microwaves instead of light. Solid state masers are used in a variety of applications, including deep space communication, but they've never been as popular as lasers, in part because they have to be cooled to near absolute zero in order to work. Now a team of British physicists have built a room-temperature maser using some spare chemicals and a laser they bought off of eBay. The new device is 100 million times as powerful as existing masers and might revolutionize telecommunications."
Absolute Zero (Score:5, Insightful)
Just to nitpick a bit, 10 K (as the article mentions) is really quite easy to achieve with off-the-shelf cryogenic equipment, and not the "near absolute zero" as the summary sort of suggests (I usually reserve this for 1 K, but maybe this is just me).
Re:Cold Fusion? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because you are a knee jerk moron who can't actual read the entire description, much less the article, before pounding your meat hooks into your key board in some vain attempt at a brow furrowing thought?
Conservation of angst (Score:2, Insightful)
This may drain all of the angst out of the entire school, altering youth forever.
Re:Staff Weapon! (Score:2, Insightful)
i'd rather have a zat'nik'tel
Like SimCity2000 (Score:0, Insightful)
Here we unlock microwave power plants, next unlock is fusion so get excited!
Re:room temperature maser is not novel (Score:5, Insightful)
But those aren't solid-state. This is.
That's why it's a breakthrough. Solid state laser diodes got us optical media, fiber optics, 3d scanners, etc, because they're not fragile, big, and expensive like gas lasers. Gas masers are big, expensive, and fragile and need specialized technicians to keep running. Solid state masers you can take out in the field. You can put them in a hand-held device. Plus it's cheap. Really cheap. I just looked up the cost of p-Terphenyl and it's $165 for 100 grams of scintillation grade. That's a lot of crystal, and the dopant is $64 for 100mg. While that's a lot more expensive than platinum, it's a dopant - you only need a tiny amount in a crystal, on the order of .05%. 100mg of dopant can tint 200g of p-Terphenyl.
Applications? It will revolutionize microwave comms and broadcast links. Microwave tower links are everywhere but the problem is there are so many and interference is a huge issue. A tower-to-tower maser link is not going to be as prone to spreading and causing interference and doesn't require the power of current microwave links. Broadcast and comms engineers are already salivating at the prospects. And that's just one application.
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BMO