Everyone talking about magenta and brown, but you can see an illusory color right now even without lasers! https://dynomight.net/colors/ behold, some kind of hyper-turquoise
The whole idea of colour and light frequency is fascinating.
These are just frequencies of light, but the subjective experience of them is so much more.
And the whole thing of my perception of "red" or what I call "red" could be very different to someone else's subjective perception. But we would both call it red and associate it with the same thing, fire, love, heat, danger etc.
I have seen Wiggtenstein's language games invoked to explain this "your red isn't my red" possibility, but I've never really been able to follow the reasoning.
Perhaps some philosophically inclined HNer who passes by here can let me know if this is a legit application of his ideas?
> what I call "red" could be very different to someone else's subjective perception
It's worth noting that is true of virtually everything we know. >>This is a very simple sentence.<< Anybody who understands English, 'understands' it. But what it means to understand it is perhaps completely different for each person. As long as they fit into the same place in their worldview (Lewis Caroll's Carrollian syllogisms come to mind), practically it often doesn't matter beyond recognizing the wonderful uniqueness of each human being. Likewise, unless somebody is color blind or perceives more colors than others (tetrachromats), it doesn't matter since the relationships between the different concepts or colors will be analogous amongst most people - so a common understanding within the differences is possible. Or perhaps it is more precise to say that there are so many data points in color perception or anything we know, that despite the minor differences in relationships, we understand each other because the differences must be minimal given the practically unlimited data points constraining our perceptions. In fact, when people's perceptions of things vary too much, they can be classified as mentally ill even if they understand many things perfectly well.
I think it's important to remember that we're not perceiving some fundamental aspect of light. We're perceiving how the photosensitive portions of our retina convert light to stimulus, and how our brains construct a meaningful image from that stimulus in our mind.
Like film photography doesn't happen in the lens or the world. It happens in that photosensitive chemical reaction, and the decision of the photographer.
If you pay attention to cats, you figure out they are fuzzy little “difference engines.” They seem to be hyper-tuned to things that change.
For example, if I move a small item in the corner of my room, the next time the cat walks in, he’ll go straight to it, and sniff around.
I have a feeling that cat’s eyes have some kind of “movement sensors,” built in. Maybe things that move look red, and most of the background looks grey.
is the only part i.e., we perceive what brain predicts no more no less. Optical illusions demonstrate it well.
Sometimes that prediction (our perception) correlates with the light reaching the retina. But it is a mistake to think that we can perceive it directly. For example, we do not see the black hole in our field of vision where there are no receptors (due to our eyes construction).
Another example that makes the point clearer: there are no "wetness" receptors at all but we perceive wetness just fine.
It’s an important point: all our sensations are interpretations of readings from various sensing abilities.
Which is why it can be so easy to produce false sensations of many things. It’s like tricking your fridge into turning the light off by pressing the little switch instead of closing the door. The fridge isn’t detecting when the door is closed, it’s detecting with that switch is pressed and interpreting that as meaning the door is closed. However that interpretation may not always be correct.
It reminds me of how vinyl records are fairly lossy, but they provide a superior experience in some cases because those limitations have been accounted for during the mastering process.
It's an entire pipeline from photomultiplier to recording medium to the inverse process and everything is optimized not for any particular mathematical truth but for the subjective experience.
Vinyls are sometimes preferred because people like white noise, same as tube amps.
Granted some CDs are mastered like garbage, and that led to some bad press for awhile. But you can master a CD so that it sounds exactly, as in mathematically exactly, as a vinyl record, if so desired.
It is also possible to make a digital amplifier that sounds exactly identical to vacuum tubes.
Humans have well and mastered the art of shaping sound waveforms however we want.
I mean I've always thought the kinetic experience of vinyl was the point: my childhood memory is the excitement and anticipation of carefully putting the needle on the lead in and hearing the subtle pops and scratches that meant it was about to start.
The whole physical enterprise has a narrative and anticipation to it.
Not to mention the wider context of starting off by opening a beautifully designed record sleeve, and the chances people choosing to listening to vinyl are doing so on a beautifully engineered soundsystem that cost as much as a car when it was released 50 years ago, or a turntable setup that's designed for them to interact with.
> carefully putting the needle on the lead in and hearing the subtle pops and scratches
Led Zeppelin III actually used that lead in as part of the music experience, and the original CD pressing didn't capture it. I've heard CD pressings (even the name remains from vinyl) that do capture it, I don't know when that started.
While our precise perception of red may not match, the interplay between colors is such that people perceived them to go together, or clash, etc, in a somewhat consistent fashion.
This means that, over the general population the perception of color is very similar from person to person. Ignoring genetic defects.
I worked in a creative shop, so we sold a lot of colors of ink, paint, crayons etc.
It’s interesting to watch people trying to pick “red” when there is like a whole gamut of red. Not only that, but it depends on the lighting around as well. (Is it evening, day, what kind of lighting fixtures are there?)
Creatives usually have 10 kelvin white boxes for a neutral color experience. A bit like audio folks have calibrated monitor speakers.
The colors most certainly exist without the name. You may have described the fruit as being a weird shade of red, but if someone held up something red and said "so it was this color" you'd say no. Conversely if someone held up something that was actually orange colored, you'd say "yeah it was that color."
Similarly, you may have no idea what the name is for the color of a Tangerine, but you know what that color is. You might describe it as a dark orange. If I say the name for it is coquelicot, you can look up coquelicot and see if it matches the color you picture in your mind.
I don't think so. Just becoming fluent in multiple languages can result in the perception of more distinct colors. And those fluent in languages that have additional distinct color names can differentiate subtle differences in the shades of colors that non-speakers cannot even differentiate. Color is less about seeing what is actually out there and more about how our brain interprets colors to create "meaning".
> And those fluent in languages that have additional distinct color names can differentiate subtle differences in the shades of colors that non-speakers cannot even differentiate.
The ability to label more colors is not the ability to perceive more colors. The ability of your cone cells to recognize a difference in color between two samples is unaffected by language.
You're actually further away from the truth than you will ever know.
1. Colours do NOT actually exist - they are purely an interpretation by your brain of signals encountered by sensors. Light exists at different frequencies, yes, but what colour is 2.6 GHz? What about light in the gamma spectrum?
2. While the wavelengths were always there, the concept of "Orange" as a distinct category didn't exist for English speakers until the fruit arrived. Before that, it was just "yellow-red" (geoluread) - as has already been mentioned. If you don't have a word for a transition, your brain often fails to categorise it as a distinct entity, effectively "grouping" it with its neighbours. The fruit literally defined the colour for the language.
Finally, just FTR coquelicot is actually a vivid poppy red - it comes from the French name for the flower.
The name for the color doesn’t exist before the name. But, you can distinguish all sorts of colors you don’t know the name for. Look at a smooth color wheel or a wall of paint swatches.
I have thought about this before as well. Like maybe what I see as red you see as purple but since we have always been taught that what we both see is red to both of us it is red.
I am however leaning more to the belief that typically we all see colors the same. But it is one of those things that could never be proven.
Another interesting thought that comes to mind speaking about color perceptions is I recently read an article or post I honestly don't remember where that discussed what do blind people see like do they just see blackness all the time. According to what I read it claimed that people born blind don't actually see a blackout picture they literally just don't perceive anything. I think for most it would be hard to imagine nothingness but I could accept that as a true fact.
> I am however leaning more to the belief that typically we all see colors the same.
Some of us explicitly don't see colour the same - I'm partially colourblind, and have pretty concrete evidence that I don't see colour that same way the average person does.
Turns out that while we tend to assign a binary colourblind/not-colourblind threshold to this, in practice humans exist along more of a spectrum of colour acuity (not to mention there are half-a-dozen distinct variants of colourblindness)
Any day that I learn something new about color is a good day.
Here's my favorite color factoid: There is no such thing as monochromatic pink. You have to make it by combining the two ends of the visible spectrum: somethung reddish and something violet-ish. So that means there is no pink in a rainbow, strictly speaking.
This is conflating two kinds of pink. The pink made from combining ends of the spectrum is most commonly termed ‘hot pink.’
The other, very often just ‘pink,’ is predominantly a light red. A quick and sloppy way to describe this is a light grey with a raised red component.
Also, you can make hot pink without needing to use spectral violet (the ‘end’ of the spectrum) since there are combinations of blue and red that are ‘metameric,’ creating a perceptually matching response in our eyes.
> Weird stuff will happen, but stay focused on the dot. Blink if you must. It takes one minute and it’s probably best to experience it without extra information i.e. without reading past this sentence.
That picture of the wafer with a rainbow of shapes is very misleading. It suggests that the various colors you see on the chip is the various colors the lasers can emit, which is wrong; it's just diffraction, and has nothing to do with the topic of the article. (But, PR people gotta PR...)
> When it comes to information transfer and processing, light can do things that electricity can’t. Photons — particles of light — are far zippier than electrons at working their way through circuits.
Electrons themselves don't move at the speed of light, but information transfer (i.e. communication) via electrons does happen close to the speed of light.
A subtle, but important, distinction that's often misunderstood and means computational performance gains would probably come from bandwidth, not latency.
About 0.6c for cat6 cables, different types of cables can be slightly faster. Speed of light in fiber is also 0.6c due to the refractive index of the core.
You're both wrong. It's true that the first whisper of movement travels at the speed of light, but the time until the flow stabilizes (which you WILL need to wait for in electrical chips) is actually slower than the "speed of electricity".
Oh and also: currently the idea behind on-chip lasers is interconnects that don't have this limitation. For example, PCIE is looking to build optical interconnects, which will do the equivalent of bringing every GPU 10x closer to the memory.
Optical computation would require that light switches light transistors on and off, which doesn't seem to be possible with this technology. This is optical computation in the sense of allowing light beams to be produced according to formulas.
Is this the cheaper way to get to extreme uv lithography as from what I understand the largest bottle neck for China has been to get the exact wavelength needed to go small enough?
No, the problem is getting a high power (hundreds of watts) and high uptime EUV source, there's no reason to think this is a step towards that at the moment.
* You can pack many more different colors into fiber optic communication lines. Every color carries a few tens of GHz in modulation, but the carrier light is in hundreds of THz; there's a ton of bandwidth not used between readily available colors.
* You can likely do interesting molecular chemistry by precisely adjusting laser light to the energy levels of particular bonds / electrons.
* Maybe you can precisely target particular wavelengths / absorption bands for more efficient laser cutting and welding, if these adjustable lasers can be made high-power.
Fiber has fairly narrow windows in which it is as transparent as it needs to be to go long distance. We're already pretty good at filling these windows with conventional semiconductor lasers.
What this is actually interesting for is being able to access arbitrary atomic transitions, many of which are outside the range of conventional semiconductors (too short, usually - there's a big hole between green and red for semiconductors). That's why they talk about quantum stuff.
> Jury Finds Live Nation Acts as a Monopoly in a Victory for States
In a verdict that could have far-reaching consequences in the music industry, the live colossus that includes Ticketmaster was found to have violated antitrust laws.
The substance is they've created a way to fabricate a device that can make the optical frequencies they wish. That is useful: it means a designer isn't limited to frequencies that are economic to generate with existing techniques, which is a constraint that lasers currently struggle with: low cost, compact, efficient laser sources (the kind that fit on a chip, and are fabricated by cost effective processes,) only exist for a limited number of frequencies.
The story is typical tech journalism pabulum, but the underlying paper does discuss efficiency. It's about what you'd expect: 35 mW -> 6 mW @ 485 nm, for example.
An obvious use case is multimode fiber communication: perhaps this makes it possible to use more frequencies for greater bandwidth and/or make the devices cheaper/smaller/more efficient. But there are other, more exotic things one might do when some optical frequency that was previously uneconomic becomes feasible to use at scale.
It’s like any other fundamental research: you don’t know how much it’s worth until people start using it to solve real problems. This is something that is literally impossible to guess ahead of time. The most abstract mathematical techniques could turn into a trillion–dollar industry (number theory begat RSA encryption which now underpins _everything_ we do).
But I will say that precise control of laser wavelength is critical to today’s communication technologies. I doubt their new techniques will be useless.
Hopefully the billions money in AI will find some of its to turn this into real life applications. AI inference would love some more faster more efficient communication.
I mean, Photonic computing already got the attention of these big tech companies.
I think it's more relevant for quantum computing. The ions we choose for ion trap quantum computers are in part due to what wavelengths are excitable by modified telecom lasers, because they're the wavelengths that are easiest to produce and where the most research/stability/miniaturization has been focused. If the laser wavelength is configurable to this degree then it no longer becomes a constraint, and maybe you can choose single ions with different characteristics.
Not an expert in the field but it seems to me the key points are.
Generating any wavelength. (this article)
Accurately measuring wavelength. (otherwise there's no information benefit to arbitrary wavelength generation)
Wavelength insensitive holographic gates. (If they work on that frequency, and in a way that does not change the frequency) I don't know what properties such devices currently have
Assuming all of those, your ability to compute increases to your ability to distinguish wavelengths.
You could theoretically calculate much more in a way you could never detect, but then you get into some really interesting tree falling in a forest issues.
Depends on the cost. We already have variable wavelength lasers. We have had them for years. They are currently expensive, large, and not the easiest things to control electronically.
I have an application in mind for this technology outside of photonic computing. Again, it depends entirely on price, tunability, bandwidth of the profile, etc. My understanding of the photocomputing field is limited but I never thought the major issues were wavelength related? Maybe someone can educate me.
If anyone wants to send me one of these I would be pumped.
There's a lot of people here with esoteric knowledge of lasers, because they're generally incredible devices (along with masers). Someone should be able to comment.
I wish we had a large laser manufacturing ability in the West. I would say 95% of lasers of all kinds are manufactured in China.
I'm excited for new displays where instead of RGB primaries that can only show a triangular subset of possible colours, we have dynamic primaries that can combine to show almost any colour.
That's the easy part, just use a color space with imaginary primaries (see e.g. ProPhoto RGB), or use one with real primaries that allows for negative values – e.g. Windows uses floating point scRGB for HDR, which is just linear BT.709/sRGB, but negative RGB values can be used to cover the full range of real and imaginary colors.
That's most certainly good news (depending on the final cost) for ion trapping quantum computing - the wavelength of the laser they require to trap an ion depends on the molecule chosen, and most setups are expensive, finicky and difficult to calibrate, or sometimes messy if it's a dye laser.
Title is misleading. This is about integrated optics that can do "computation" on the frequency of laser input using all kinds of nonlinear optical effects.
I don't think so- seems like they demonstrated a supercontinuum source, which is a pretty good approximation of "any wavelength" laser. Pretty cool on an integrated chip.
Where is the source? Tantalo does not produce photons, it is not like GaAs that you can pump and get stimulated emission. The Nature paper does not have laser in the title.
It’s really fascinating electrons took 60 years to go from chip to a smart device and if photons follow the same thing then we just fired the starting gun. It’s really interesting to see tantala material takes a single laser color in and spits out to a full rainbow.
I don't know to much about photonics but if they ever figure out the boolean algebra and register storage it would be really cool. You have 1 photo cpu core but just use different wavelengths for different threads running in the core. I am sure its way more complex than that but articles like this make you dream about how much we don't know
The "shrinking" circle: I did as asked and clicked the image to see the animation. I saw no shrinking. My eyes did fatigue and I saw the border between the red and green become a blurred gradient.
You have to not blink too much or it resets the effect. After about a minute, the intense blue shows up around the red. And I say that as a man who has yet to see anything in a Magic Eye poster after a half century of what some would call life.
since the light range is so high, technically speaking as the technology improves does that mean we could end up sending petabytes a second over a single fiber optic core?
Would you care to explain how the NICT guys achieved 402Tb/s through a single (50km long!) fiber back in 2024 then? It seems like another factor of two would easily be in reach if they could extend their setup into the visible.
Fibers are not transparent enough in visible. I found about 10dB/km (to be compared with 0.2 dB/km around 1550nm) [0]. This means that after every km the light intensity is divided by 10, which is completely impractical for telecommunications.
He says brown is perceived when you see an orange-wavelength light that is significantly darker than its surroundings, providing the necessary context for your brain to interpret it as brown.
Something to be aware of, the laser safety goggles used by lab workers, pilots, soldiers etc are based on the premise that lasers only occupy extremely specific and narrow parts of the spectrum so by just blocking those little bits, you can get a very effective pair of glasses that doesn't significantly effect visibility. Arbitrary waveform lasers cause problems here.
One of its receptors only detects circularly polarized light
But the only thing we know of, in the entire natural world, that emits circularly polarized light... is the reflection off the shell of the mantis shrimp.
The Mantis Shrimp most likely sees very much like us (or birds, snakes), it's just that its brain is too small to integrate signals from just three types of cones, so it evolved a whole rainbow of cones.
At high energies I think you could point two at a spot in space and get antimatter where the beams cross (also matter, and then an explosion... see the Breit-Wheeler process).
We have a hard enough time building shipping-container sized devices that reflect extreme ultraviolet though... so I think a handheld gamma ray laser is off the table for this century.
But, is there any property of that point in space you could measure by how exactly this occurs?
I.e. could you make some kind of massive confocal telescope using this effect in place of regular multi-photon fluorescence, to measure a 3D volume of space?
I just thought it would be fun to have a tiny ball of destruction that I could move around arbitrarily. What would I do with it? I dunno... maybe something resembling CNC milling? Etch "hello world" on the inside of a containiner without opening it?
As for building a sensor with it goes... I suppose you could create sources of light very far away without bothering to send an emitter or reflector to that location. Seems like you could use this to build a gravitational wave telescope that was much bigger than the earth.
Probably you could also break some rules regarding line-of-sight communication. If you want to transmit around an inconveniently placed moon you could send an amplitude modulated signal at point on the moon's side, the receiver could send a beam that was nearly at the pair production threshold aimed at the same point. The signal, where it intersected the beam, would take the photon flux over the threshold, repeating your signal from a more advantageous location. Although since we're already invoking godlike technology here... you might as well just use neutrinos to communicate directly through that moon.
The final frontier of display tech (as far as being able to elicit any physiologically possible eye response) is a pair of tunable lasers. You really can't go much farther than that for emissive displays! We're almost saturated (no pun intended) on useful resolution, so I expect color to be the next area of focus.
Just read the article and didn't see anything about building an actual laser… what details the article has (and its scant) its seems they took a fluorescing layer and sandwiched with a color wheel and added the additional wiring and control circuitry…
(Obviously more nuanced and interesting physics but still…)
cool and practical, but not a diode and definitely not a laser… I could be wrong and would love to be!
… now, if that setup could be drawn out into a fiber laser as cladding with a wide spectrum neural amplifying core (if such a material exists) that could maybe be something idk
I was thinking the same thing. The stuff ASML does to produce a light at exactly the right wavelength is bananas. Making of stream of molten tin, and shooting each droplet with a laser, twice! Then bouncing the light through a series of super high precision mirrors to capture just the right spread. If you can get a laser to produce your desired wavelength without all that complexity, that's a major breakthrough.
An application that came to mind is tunneling (through rock and earth). You could absolutely tune the wavelength to whatever material your drilling through absorbs best, to help ease and speed. Would need a good amount of energy but I could see that utilized in some fashion in the next 10-20 years
I remember seeing a yt video about this tech being already trialed (w/ regular lasers) for geothermal. They use lasers to "vaporise" rock, in the hopes of digging much more efficiently.
Pedantry for pedantry, you're in luck as the title says they created 'any wavelength lasers' not 'any wavelength laser' so you can make any such combos you like rather than the fixed set now (if true) :p.
What we call "magenta" is the sensation of both red and blue color-sensitive cells in the eye being excited at the same time. There's no single wavelength that produces this effect (unlike e.g. yellow). The closes you can get is violet, which looks faint to the eye.
A rainbow gives you both red and blue; mute everything else, and you'll get magenta. That's what magenta pigments do when illuminated by white light (which is a rainbow scrambled).
The interference is a wavelength too. Maybe not pure but it is one. Afaik they cannot be interpreted as two separate wavelengths and then “brain combined” when the aperture (the retina) is so small.
I haven't heard of a wavelength of 2 frequencies merged. It is like saying what is the wavelength if you tune to 2 radio stations with 2 radios (assume silent transmition for simplicity). There are 2 wavelengths.
Here's a nice visualization of color perception (there are more modern ones, but we used the 1931 color space when I was working in the field). The horseshoe shape on the outside is the single wavelength colors.
Everyone talking about magenta and brown, but you can see an illusory color right now even without lasers! https://dynomight.net/colors/ behold, some kind of hyper-turquoise
The whole idea of colour and light frequency is fascinating.
These are just frequencies of light, but the subjective experience of them is so much more.
And the whole thing of my perception of "red" or what I call "red" could be very different to someone else's subjective perception. But we would both call it red and associate it with the same thing, fire, love, heat, danger etc.
I have seen Wiggtenstein's language games invoked to explain this "your red isn't my red" possibility, but I've never really been able to follow the reasoning.
Perhaps some philosophically inclined HNer who passes by here can let me know if this is a legit application of his ideas?
> what I call "red" could be very different to someone else's subjective perception
It's worth noting that is true of virtually everything we know. >>This is a very simple sentence.<< Anybody who understands English, 'understands' it. But what it means to understand it is perhaps completely different for each person. As long as they fit into the same place in their worldview (Lewis Caroll's Carrollian syllogisms come to mind), practically it often doesn't matter beyond recognizing the wonderful uniqueness of each human being. Likewise, unless somebody is color blind or perceives more colors than others (tetrachromats), it doesn't matter since the relationships between the different concepts or colors will be analogous amongst most people - so a common understanding within the differences is possible. Or perhaps it is more precise to say that there are so many data points in color perception or anything we know, that despite the minor differences in relationships, we understand each other because the differences must be minimal given the practically unlimited data points constraining our perceptions. In fact, when people's perceptions of things vary too much, they can be classified as mentally ill even if they understand many things perfectly well.
I think it's important to remember that we're not perceiving some fundamental aspect of light. We're perceiving how the photosensitive portions of our retina convert light to stimulus, and how our brains construct a meaningful image from that stimulus in our mind.
Like film photography doesn't happen in the lens or the world. It happens in that photosensitive chemical reaction, and the decision of the photographer.
If you pay attention to cats, you figure out they are fuzzy little “difference engines.” They seem to be hyper-tuned to things that change.
For example, if I move a small item in the corner of my room, the next time the cat walks in, he’ll go straight to it, and sniff around.
I have a feeling that cat’s eyes have some kind of “movement sensors,” built in. Maybe things that move look red, and most of the background looks grey.
> how our brain construct
is the only part i.e., we perceive what brain predicts no more no less. Optical illusions demonstrate it well.
Sometimes that prediction (our perception) correlates with the light reaching the retina. But it is a mistake to think that we can perceive it directly. For example, we do not see the black hole in our field of vision where there are no receptors (due to our eyes construction).
Another example that makes the point clearer: there are no "wetness" receptors at all but we perceive wetness just fine.
It’s an important point: all our sensations are interpretations of readings from various sensing abilities.
Which is why it can be so easy to produce false sensations of many things. It’s like tricking your fridge into turning the light off by pressing the little switch instead of closing the door. The fridge isn’t detecting when the door is closed, it’s detecting with that switch is pressed and interpreting that as meaning the door is closed. However that interpretation may not always be correct.
It reminds me of how vinyl records are fairly lossy, but they provide a superior experience in some cases because those limitations have been accounted for during the mastering process.
It's an entire pipeline from photomultiplier to recording medium to the inverse process and everything is optimized not for any particular mathematical truth but for the subjective experience.
Vinyls are sometimes preferred because people like white noise, same as tube amps.
Granted some CDs are mastered like garbage, and that led to some bad press for awhile. But you can master a CD so that it sounds exactly, as in mathematically exactly, as a vinyl record, if so desired.
It is also possible to make a digital amplifier that sounds exactly identical to vacuum tubes.
Humans have well and mastered the art of shaping sound waveforms however we want.
I mean I've always thought the kinetic experience of vinyl was the point: my childhood memory is the excitement and anticipation of carefully putting the needle on the lead in and hearing the subtle pops and scratches that meant it was about to start.
The whole physical enterprise has a narrative and anticipation to it.
Not to mention the wider context of starting off by opening a beautifully designed record sleeve, and the chances people choosing to listening to vinyl are doing so on a beautifully engineered soundsystem that cost as much as a car when it was released 50 years ago, or a turntable setup that's designed for them to interact with.
Most records these days use CDs as masters, sadly.
Are you referring to the loudness wars?
This is true, and illusionary at the same time.
While our precise perception of red may not match, the interplay between colors is such that people perceived them to go together, or clash, etc, in a somewhat consistent fashion.
This means that, over the general population the perception of color is very similar from person to person. Ignoring genetic defects.
I worked in a creative shop, so we sold a lot of colors of ink, paint, crayons etc.
It’s interesting to watch people trying to pick “red” when there is like a whole gamut of red. Not only that, but it depends on the lighting around as well. (Is it evening, day, what kind of lighting fixtures are there?)
Creatives usually have 10 kelvin white boxes for a neutral color experience. A bit like audio folks have calibrated monitor speakers.
>subjective experience of them is so much more
It's just that our eyes kinda suck and evolution had to make up in buggy software.
But also - colours don't exist without a name
eg. Before Orange, there was only shades of yellow or reds
The colors most certainly exist without the name. You may have described the fruit as being a weird shade of red, but if someone held up something red and said "so it was this color" you'd say no. Conversely if someone held up something that was actually orange colored, you'd say "yeah it was that color."
Similarly, you may have no idea what the name is for the color of a Tangerine, but you know what that color is. You might describe it as a dark orange. If I say the name for it is coquelicot, you can look up coquelicot and see if it matches the color you picture in your mind.
I don't think so. Just becoming fluent in multiple languages can result in the perception of more distinct colors. And those fluent in languages that have additional distinct color names can differentiate subtle differences in the shades of colors that non-speakers cannot even differentiate. Color is less about seeing what is actually out there and more about how our brain interprets colors to create "meaning".
> And those fluent in languages that have additional distinct color names can differentiate subtle differences in the shades of colors that non-speakers cannot even differentiate.
The ability to label more colors is not the ability to perceive more colors. The ability of your cone cells to recognize a difference in color between two samples is unaffected by language.
I think you are correct, but the likelihood of perceiving probably is tied to language.
It's amazing how much time we spend on autopilot.
You're actually further away from the truth than you will ever know.
1. Colours do NOT actually exist - they are purely an interpretation by your brain of signals encountered by sensors. Light exists at different frequencies, yes, but what colour is 2.6 GHz? What about light in the gamma spectrum?
2. While the wavelengths were always there, the concept of "Orange" as a distinct category didn't exist for English speakers until the fruit arrived. Before that, it was just "yellow-red" (geoluread) - as has already been mentioned. If you don't have a word for a transition, your brain often fails to categorise it as a distinct entity, effectively "grouping" it with its neighbours. The fruit literally defined the colour for the language.
Finally, just FTR coquelicot is actually a vivid poppy red - it comes from the French name for the flower.
The name for the color doesn’t exist before the name. But, you can distinguish all sorts of colors you don’t know the name for. Look at a smooth color wheel or a wall of paint swatches.
I have thought about this before as well. Like maybe what I see as red you see as purple but since we have always been taught that what we both see is red to both of us it is red.
I am however leaning more to the belief that typically we all see colors the same. But it is one of those things that could never be proven.
Another interesting thought that comes to mind speaking about color perceptions is I recently read an article or post I honestly don't remember where that discussed what do blind people see like do they just see blackness all the time. According to what I read it claimed that people born blind don't actually see a blackout picture they literally just don't perceive anything. I think for most it would be hard to imagine nothingness but I could accept that as a true fact.
> I am however leaning more to the belief that typically we all see colors the same.
Some of us explicitly don't see colour the same - I'm partially colourblind, and have pretty concrete evidence that I don't see colour that same way the average person does.
Turns out that while we tend to assign a binary colourblind/not-colourblind threshold to this, in practice humans exist along more of a spectrum of colour acuity (not to mention there are half-a-dozen distinct variants of colourblindness)
Any day that I learn something new about color is a good day.
Here's my favorite color factoid: There is no such thing as monochromatic pink. You have to make it by combining the two ends of the visible spectrum: somethung reddish and something violet-ish. So that means there is no pink in a rainbow, strictly speaking.
This is conflating two kinds of pink. The pink made from combining ends of the spectrum is most commonly termed ‘hot pink.’
The other, very often just ‘pink,’ is predominantly a light red. A quick and sloppy way to describe this is a light grey with a raised red component.
Also, you can make hot pink without needing to use spectral violet (the ‘end’ of the spectrum) since there are combinations of blue and red that are ‘metameric,’ creating a perceptually matching response in our eyes.
The other, very often just ‘pink,’ is predominantly a light red. A quick and sloppy way to describe this is a light grey with a raised red component.
While that’s true, it’s also still not monochromatic in the electromagnetic sense.
When I was young I was taught that pink is a light shade of red. But what kids these days call pink seems to me to be a bright magenta.
The word "pink" is derived from a name this flower had about 600 years ago:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/42/Dianthus...
So however you see that flower, that's the literal pink prototype.
FYI if you get ocular/retinal migraines like me then the exercise in this article might be a bad idea.
Well this explains tripping on acid a little bit
I worked with a brown laser when I was in grad school. It made a couple of brown spots on the wall by accident.
> Weird stuff will happen, but stay focused on the dot. Blink if you must. It takes one minute and it’s probably best to experience it without extra information i.e. without reading past this sentence.
well that was a waste of fucking time
very interesting, its quite striking, now I'm even more curious how this compares with the lasers.
For those not seeing it or only seeing a little, stare at it for a while then shake your head (or your phone) just a bit.
Also there are other variants and tricks around this for other colors as well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color
That picture of the wafer with a rainbow of shapes is very misleading. It suggests that the various colors you see on the chip is the various colors the lasers can emit, which is wrong; it's just diffraction, and has nothing to do with the topic of the article. (But, PR people gotta PR...)
> When it comes to information transfer and processing, light can do things that electricity can’t. Photons — particles of light — are far zippier than electrons at working their way through circuits.
Electrons themselves don't move at the speed of light, but information transfer (i.e. communication) via electrons does happen close to the speed of light.
A subtle, but important, distinction that's often misunderstood and means computational performance gains would probably come from bandwidth, not latency.
About 0.6c for cat6 cables, different types of cables can be slightly faster. Speed of light in fiber is also 0.6c due to the refractive index of the core.
In electric circuits, information is transmitted through the electric field, which itself is close to the speed of light.
Nope, it's 1/2 - 2/3 the speed of light depending on the metals used.
The velocity factor is usually 0.6-0.7, never seen it as low as 0.5.
And it's set by the dielectric, not the conducting material.
You're both wrong. It's true that the first whisper of movement travels at the speed of light, but the time until the flow stabilizes (which you WILL need to wait for in electrical chips) is actually slower than the "speed of electricity".
Oh and also: currently the idea behind on-chip lasers is interconnects that don't have this limitation. For example, PCIE is looking to build optical interconnects, which will do the equivalent of bringing every GPU 10x closer to the memory.
Optical computation would require that light switches light transistors on and off, which doesn't seem to be possible with this technology. This is optical computation in the sense of allowing light beams to be produced according to formulas.
Is this the cheaper way to get to extreme uv lithography as from what I understand the largest bottle neck for China has been to get the exact wavelength needed to go small enough?
No, the problem is getting a high power (hundreds of watts) and high uptime EUV source, there's no reason to think this is a step towards that at the moment.
Is there a single person here interested in photonic computing that wants to explain to the class if there's any "there" there?
Immediately:
* You can pack many more different colors into fiber optic communication lines. Every color carries a few tens of GHz in modulation, but the carrier light is in hundreds of THz; there's a ton of bandwidth not used between readily available colors.
* You can likely do interesting molecular chemistry by precisely adjusting laser light to the energy levels of particular bonds / electrons.
* Maybe you can precisely target particular wavelengths / absorption bands for more efficient laser cutting and welding, if these adjustable lasers can be made high-power.
Fiber has fairly narrow windows in which it is as transparent as it needs to be to go long distance. We're already pretty good at filling these windows with conventional semiconductor lasers.
What this is actually interesting for is being able to access arbitrary atomic transitions, many of which are outside the range of conventional semiconductors (too short, usually - there's a big hole between green and red for semiconductors). That's why they talk about quantum stuff.
* Concert lasers just got a lot cooler.
Concert tickets will still remain very hot though.
Even with the latest updates?
> Jury Finds Live Nation Acts as a Monopoly in a Victory for States In a verdict that could have far-reaching consequences in the music industry, the live colossus that includes Ticketmaster was found to have violated antitrust laws.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/arts/music/live-nation-an...
> precisely adjusting laser light to the energy levels of particular bonds / electrons.
However, the article is talking about discrete wavelengths. The device gives you a choice between a bunch of different fixed wavelengths.
It isn't actually tunable to specific frequencies.
Disclaimer: skim read article plus I know very little about the topic
There is there there...
The substance is they've created a way to fabricate a device that can make the optical frequencies they wish. That is useful: it means a designer isn't limited to frequencies that are economic to generate with existing techniques, which is a constraint that lasers currently struggle with: low cost, compact, efficient laser sources (the kind that fit on a chip, and are fabricated by cost effective processes,) only exist for a limited number of frequencies.
The story is typical tech journalism pabulum, but the underlying paper does discuss efficiency. It's about what you'd expect: 35 mW -> 6 mW @ 485 nm, for example.
An obvious use case is multimode fiber communication: perhaps this makes it possible to use more frequencies for greater bandwidth and/or make the devices cheaper/smaller/more efficient. But there are other, more exotic things one might do when some optical frequency that was previously uneconomic becomes feasible to use at scale.
I wonder if this could also work for (e)uv
I wondered this too - why are you being downvoted for asking?
All the difficulty to create that laser it seems fair enough to ask!
It’s like any other fundamental research: you don’t know how much it’s worth until people start using it to solve real problems. This is something that is literally impossible to guess ahead of time. The most abstract mathematical techniques could turn into a trillion–dollar industry (number theory begat RSA encryption which now underpins _everything_ we do).
But I will say that precise control of laser wavelength is critical to today’s communication technologies. I doubt their new techniques will be useless.
Hopefully the billions money in AI will find some of its to turn this into real life applications. AI inference would love some more faster more efficient communication.
I mean, Photonic computing already got the attention of these big tech companies.
I think it's more relevant for quantum computing. The ions we choose for ion trap quantum computers are in part due to what wavelengths are excitable by modified telecom lasers, because they're the wavelengths that are easiest to produce and where the most research/stability/miniaturization has been focused. If the laser wavelength is configurable to this degree then it no longer becomes a constraint, and maybe you can choose single ions with different characteristics.
Not an expert in the field but it seems to me the key points are.
Generating any wavelength. (this article)
Accurately measuring wavelength. (otherwise there's no information benefit to arbitrary wavelength generation)
Wavelength insensitive holographic gates. (If they work on that frequency, and in a way that does not change the frequency) I don't know what properties such devices currently have
Assuming all of those, your ability to compute increases to your ability to distinguish wavelengths.
You could theoretically calculate much more in a way you could never detect, but then you get into some really interesting tree falling in a forest issues.
Depends on the cost. We already have variable wavelength lasers. We have had them for years. They are currently expensive, large, and not the easiest things to control electronically.
I have an application in mind for this technology outside of photonic computing. Again, it depends entirely on price, tunability, bandwidth of the profile, etc. My understanding of the photocomputing field is limited but I never thought the major issues were wavelength related? Maybe someone can educate me.
If anyone wants to send me one of these I would be pumped.
There's a lot of people here with esoteric knowledge of lasers, because they're generally incredible devices (along with masers). Someone should be able to comment.
I wish we had a large laser manufacturing ability in the West. I would say 95% of lasers of all kinds are manufactured in China.
I'm excited for new displays where instead of RGB primaries that can only show a triangular subset of possible colours, we have dynamic primaries that can combine to show almost any colour.
I want all the colors! Give me the full spectral power distribution!
Promptly cooks in the microwave and infrared, and fries in X-ray and gamma radiation
Ahh true HDR
That sounds cool but how do you encode the image data?
That's the easy part, just use a color space with imaginary primaries (see e.g. ProPhoto RGB), or use one with real primaries that allows for negative values – e.g. Windows uses floating point scRGB for HDR, which is just linear BT.709/sRGB, but negative RGB values can be used to cover the full range of real and imaginary colors.
Just save pixel values as wavelength rather than RGB?
That's most certainly good news (depending on the final cost) for ion trapping quantum computing - the wavelength of the laser they require to trap an ion depends on the molecule chosen, and most setups are expensive, finicky and difficult to calibrate, or sometimes messy if it's a dye laser.
Neutral atom too. You need fairly clean light to pump atoms into Rydberg states
The actual paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08092
If only.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_laser
Ha, thanks for that. It answered my question of whether it would be called a graser.
I guess the little scifi reader in me was hoping someone reserved that term for some kind of coherent gravity wave emitter though ;-)
Title is misleading. This is about integrated optics that can do "computation" on the frequency of laser input using all kinds of nonlinear optical effects.
I don't think so- seems like they demonstrated a supercontinuum source, which is a pretty good approximation of "any wavelength" laser. Pretty cool on an integrated chip.
Where is the source? Tantalo does not produce photons, it is not like GaAs that you can pump and get stimulated emission. The Nature paper does not have laser in the title.
It’s really fascinating electrons took 60 years to go from chip to a smart device and if photons follow the same thing then we just fired the starting gun. It’s really interesting to see tantala material takes a single laser color in and spits out to a full rainbow.
The US Navy has been working on their idea of a holy grail they have deemed the free electron laser[1]
[1] https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2010-03-18-Boeing-Completes-Pre...
I don't know to much about photonics but if they ever figure out the boolean algebra and register storage it would be really cool. You have 1 photo cpu core but just use different wavelengths for different threads running in the core. I am sure its way more complex than that but articles like this make you dream about how much we don't know
I wonder if photonic computing with variable wavelengths essentially gives you a float type in silico.
My first thought is this will be used as a weapon to bypass protections against specific wavelengths
Cool, can I get a "proper" yellow diode laser from this? What's the efficiency look like?
The "shrinking" circle: I did as asked and clicked the image to see the animation. I saw no shrinking. My eyes did fatigue and I saw the border between the red and green become a blurred gradient.
What should I have experienced?
You have to not blink too much or it resets the effect. After about a minute, the intense blue shows up around the red. And I say that as a man who has yet to see anything in a Magic Eye poster after a half century of what some would call life.
State for longer. It starts shrinking only after a minute.
So does this become a new display type? Laser TV?
since the light range is so high, technically speaking as the technology improves does that mean we could end up sending petabytes a second over a single fiber optic core?
Visible light is a bit less than a petahertz, so no.
Would you care to explain how the NICT guys achieved 402Tb/s through a single (50km long!) fiber back in 2024 then? It seems like another factor of two would easily be in reach if they could extend their setup into the visible.
Fibers are not transparent enough in visible. I found about 10dB/km (to be compared with 0.2 dB/km around 1550nm) [0]. This means that after every km the light intensity is divided by 10, which is completely impractical for telecommunications.
[0] https://media.thorlabs.com/globalassets/family-pages/shareda...
Modulate frequencies, polarization, phase, amplitude, etc and you can send quite a bit.
Sounds useful for display purposes
Would I finally be able to see bright brown?
It's called orange. Much like bright gray is called white, and bright teal is called turquoise.
Light brown is called tan. Dark and light oranges exist too and they’re not exactly the same as brown.
See Technology Connections' video about Brown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU
He says brown is perceived when you see an orange-wavelength light that is significantly darker than its surroundings, providing the necessary context for your brain to interpret it as brown.
I wonder if this is a nuclear proliferation risk--could it be used for AVLIS/SILEX?
Something to be aware of, the laser safety goggles used by lab workers, pilots, soldiers etc are based on the premise that lasers only occupy extremely specific and narrow parts of the spectrum so by just blocking those little bits, you can get a very effective pair of glasses that doesn't significantly effect visibility. Arbitrary waveform lasers cause problems here.
How quickly can they get this in the Yuma tent
Can each device vary the color or is it fixed based on how it’s built? Seems the latter?
I believe you are right.
> Computer chips that cram billions of electronic devices into a few square inches have powered the digital economy and transformed the world.
Much power so chip
With two of these you should be able to display any color in the CIE colorspace.
Yes but can it do any color a mantis shrimp would like?
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp
This misses one of the best mantis shrimp facts.
One of its receptors only detects circularly polarized light
But the only thing we know of, in the entire natural world, that emits circularly polarized light... is the reflection off the shell of the mantis shrimp.
The Mantis Shrimp most likely sees very much like us (or birds, snakes), it's just that its brain is too small to integrate signals from just three types of cones, so it evolved a whole rainbow of cones.
Huh. Anywhere you'd suggest I can read more about this?
https://www.montereybayaquarium.org/stories/meet-the-mantis-...
From reading assume they mean wavelength of ~ visible light.
I too would like a microwave or gamma laser
I'll take one in gamma please.
A gamma wavelength handheld laser would be cool; "and on this petri dish, we see a dot of cells instantaneously develop cancer"
At high energies I think you could point two at a spot in space and get antimatter where the beams cross (also matter, and then an explosion... see the Breit-Wheeler process).
We have a hard enough time building shipping-container sized devices that reflect extreme ultraviolet though... so I think a handheld gamma ray laser is off the table for this century.
But, is there any property of that point in space you could measure by how exactly this occurs?
I.e. could you make some kind of massive confocal telescope using this effect in place of regular multi-photon fluorescence, to measure a 3D volume of space?
I just thought it would be fun to have a tiny ball of destruction that I could move around arbitrarily. What would I do with it? I dunno... maybe something resembling CNC milling? Etch "hello world" on the inside of a containiner without opening it?
As for building a sensor with it goes... I suppose you could create sources of light very far away without bothering to send an emitter or reflector to that location. Seems like you could use this to build a gravitational wave telescope that was much bigger than the earth.
Probably you could also break some rules regarding line-of-sight communication. If you want to transmit around an inconveniently placed moon you could send an amplitude modulated signal at point on the moon's side, the receiver could send a beam that was nearly at the pair production threshold aimed at the same point. The signal, where it intersected the beam, would take the photon flux over the threshold, repeating your signal from a more advantageous location. Although since we're already invoking godlike technology here... you might as well just use neutrinos to communicate directly through that moon.
The final frontier of display tech (as far as being able to elicit any physiologically possible eye response) is a pair of tunable lasers. You really can't go much farther than that for emissive displays! We're almost saturated (no pun intended) on useful resolution, so I expect color to be the next area of focus.
Just in time for the Trump Admin to cut some of their funding to reallocate money for a fraction of the Trump Arch.
Just read the article and didn't see anything about building an actual laser… what details the article has (and its scant) its seems they took a fluorescing layer and sandwiched with a color wheel and added the additional wiring and control circuitry… (Obviously more nuanced and interesting physics but still…) cool and practical, but not a diode and definitely not a laser… I could be wrong and would love to be!
… now, if that setup could be drawn out into a fiber laser as cladding with a wide spectrum neural amplifying core (if such a material exists) that could maybe be something idk
Very cool stuff. I regret wasting my life in software when I see other fields still doing interesting work.
0.1nm please. It's x-ray lithography time!
I was thinking the same thing. The stuff ASML does to produce a light at exactly the right wavelength is bananas. Making of stream of molten tin, and shooting each droplet with a laser, twice! Then bouncing the light through a series of super high precision mirrors to capture just the right spread. If you can get a laser to produce your desired wavelength without all that complexity, that's a major breakthrough.
can they do microwave?
if you do the exact right color you can make certain things melt very precisely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maser
thanks, I'm familiar. But it doesn't answer my question.
An application that came to mind is tunneling (through rock and earth). You could absolutely tune the wavelength to whatever material your drilling through absorbs best, to help ease and speed. Would need a good amount of energy but I could see that utilized in some fashion in the next 10-20 years
I remember seeing a yt video about this tech being already trialed (w/ regular lasers) for geothermal. They use lasers to "vaporise" rock, in the hopes of digging much more efficiently.
I think that if you can hit the right frequency, the resonant frequency for wiggling the water molecule or whatever, it can cost less energy.
So like if you can get just the right frequency you could cause a skin protein molecule to fall apart, which might be nicer than scalpels.
Maybe you could weld it too. A "protoplaser" like in startrek.
But can it produce magenta?
Not every color has a corresponding wavelength, rather a combination of wavelengths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space
Magenta is the Doom of colour lasers by the look of it.
What if I like magenta? Or brown?
Pedantry for pedantry, you're in luck as the title says they created 'any wavelength lasers' not 'any wavelength laser' so you can make any such combos you like rather than the fixed set now (if true) :p.
Can I interest you in indigo or violet? Or a nice orange?
Genuine q: how close can you get to magenta with the rainbow?
What we call "magenta" is the sensation of both red and blue color-sensitive cells in the eye being excited at the same time. There's no single wavelength that produces this effect (unlike e.g. yellow). The closes you can get is violet, which looks faint to the eye.
A rainbow gives you both red and blue; mute everything else, and you'll get magenta. That's what magenta pigments do when illuminated by white light (which is a rainbow scrambled).
It never clicked before that yellow and magenta are snowflakes to each other in this regard. I thought they were equals, but magenta is more majestic!
Saying a wavelength doesn’t do it doesn’t make any sense. If you can perceive it visually, a wavelength is doing it.
Two wavelengths do it; one does not suffice. It's like a perfect fifth can not one note.
The interference is a wavelength too. Maybe not pure but it is one. Afaik they cannot be interpreted as two separate wavelengths and then “brain combined” when the aperture (the retina) is so small.
I haven't heard of a wavelength of 2 frequencies merged. It is like saying what is the wavelength if you tune to 2 radio stations with 2 radios (assume silent transmition for simplicity). There are 2 wavelengths.
Not very! This is on the "line of purples".
Here's a nice visualization of color perception (there are more modern ones, but we used the 1931 color space when I was working in the field). The horseshoe shape on the outside is the single wavelength colors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space
what a waste of money!
just kidding this is amazing