Several weeks ago, I announced a contest to determine the Most Amazing Laser Application. Personal issues interrupted this, but I want to finish it out in honor of LaserFest Here's the list of finalists, with links to those already written up:
- Cat toy/ dog toy/ laser light show
- Laser cooling/ BEC
- Lunar laser ranging
- Optical tweezers
- Optical storage media (CD/DVD/Blu-Ray)
- LIGO
- Telecommunications
- Holography
- Laser ignited fusion
- Laser eye surgery
- Laser frequency comb/ spectroscopy
- Laser guide stars/ adaptive optics
I'll be writing up LIGO shortly, and will try to finish the whole thing as soon as possible given my other responsibilities.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
A couple of weeks ago, I announced a contest to determine the Most Amazing Laser Application. What with one thing and another, this didn't get posted last week, but I don't intend to drop it completely, and will be finishing the series up in the next week or so. Here's the list of finalists, with…
A couple of weeks ago, I announced a contest to determine the Most Amazing Laser Application. After a follow-up post listing the likely candidates, we have a final list of candidate applications, an even dozen of them (after consolidating some related topics):
Cat toy/ dog toy/ laser light show…
In 1960, the first working laser was demonstrated, and promptly dubbed "a solution looking for a problem." In the ensuing fifty years, lasers have found lots of problems to solve, but there has been no consensus about which of the many amazing applications of lasers is the most amazing.
Now, in…
Voting has closed on the Laser Smackdown poll, with 772 people recording their opinion on the most amazing of the many things that have been done with lasers in the fifty years since the invention of the first working laser (see the Laserfest web site for more on the history and applications of…