Yes, but if a chicken and a half laid an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long would it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all the seeds off a dill pickle?
slater 20 hours ago [-]
Fifteen hogsheads, of course. Fourteen if it’s a leap year.
nick238 23 hours ago [-]
Am I having a stroke? Reading the title makes my head hurt.
anigbrowl 21 hours ago [-]
I was perplexed too, but it turns out to be a straightforward paper on using natural materials to substitute for artificially produced ones for laser components. Birch leaves are apparently rich in carbon dots (which lase under the right circumstances) and simply stewing them yield a slurry with plenty of the desired substance. Peanuts have a molecular structure with plenty of large voids. Soak the peanuts in birch leaf slurry, excite them with a laser, and the organic medium demonstrates lasing behavior. Apparently this simpler and cheaper than the usual go-to materials, and has the potential to be manufactured with less toxic waste. I presume it's not as good as elemental materials but if it's good enough it might yield savings at industrial scale.
get enough gain that you can don’t need the mirrors —- it’s pretty easy to build one about a foot long that can make nanosecond pulses that are about as long as the laser.
Random lasers uses random particles to extend the optical path instead of mirrors
That column had all sorts of homemade lasers. CO2, helium-neon, dye lasers...
bigiain 20 hours ago [-]
Oh man, I miss my dad's collection of a decade or two's worth of Scientific American magazines. When I was a kid in the 70s/80s, they were pure intellectual magic to me.
chaos0815 19 hours ago [-]
first laser people have lethal allergies against...
kazinator 23 hours ago [-]
I just want to know: is the peanut okay?
Rendered at 01:49:01 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_laser_medium
"Near-Field Optical Nanopatterning of Graphene" (2025) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/smsc.202500184 .. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45623301
Why are they random lasers?
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45949800 :
> "Cavity electrodynamics of van der Waals heterostructures" (2024) https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.19745 ; graphite / graphene optical cavity
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44922581 :
> "Grover's algorithm to efficiently prepare quantum states in optical cavity QED" (2025) https://phys.org/news/2025-08-grover-algorithm-efficiently-q...:
>> "Deterministic carving of quantum states with Grover's algorithm" (2025) https://journals.aps.org/pra/abstract/10.1103/s3vs-xz7w
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_laser
get enough gain that you can don’t need the mirrors —- it’s pretty easy to build one about a foot long that can make nanosecond pulses that are about as long as the laser.
Random lasers uses random particles to extend the optical path instead of mirrors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_laser
I studied condensed matter physics and knew a professor well who was one of Anderson’s grad students so the phenomenon of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anderson_localization
which is relevant to random lasers is familiar to me.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24950104
That column had all sorts of homemade lasers. CO2, helium-neon, dye lasers...