{"id":115202,"date":"2020-10-28T14:07:52","date_gmt":"2020-10-28T21:07:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/10\/reimagining-the-laser-new-ideas-from-quantum-theory-could-herald-a-revolution"},"modified":"2020-10-28T14:07:52","modified_gmt":"2020-10-28T21:07:52","slug":"reimagining-the-laser-new-ideas-from-quantum-theory-could-herald-a-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/10\/reimagining-the-laser-new-ideas-from-quantum-theory-could-herald-a-revolution","title":{"rendered":"Reimagining the laser: New ideas from quantum theory could herald a revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/reimagining-the-laser-new-ideas-from-quantum-theory-could-herald-a-revolution.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Lasers were created 60 years ago this year, when three different laser devices were unveiled by independent laboratories in the United States. A few years later, one of these inventors called the unusual light sources \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1964\/05\/06\/archives\/developer-of-the-laser-calls-it-a-solution-seeking-a-problem.html\">a solution seeking a problem<\/a>\u201d. Today, the laser has been applied to countless problems in science, medicine and everyday technologies, with a market of more than <a href=\"https:\/\/www.photonics.com\/Articles\/A_History_of_the_Laser_1960_-_2019\/a42279\">US$11 billion<\/a> per year.<\/p>\n<p>A crucial difference between lasers and <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1510.04805\">traditional sources of light<\/a> is the \u201ctemporal coherence\u201d of the light beam, or just coherence. The coherence of a beam can be measured by a number <i>C<\/i>, which takes into account the fact light is both a wave and a particle.<\/p>\n<p>From even before lasers were created, physicists thought they knew exactly how coherent a laser could be. Now, two new studies (one by myself and colleagues in Australia, the other by a team of American physicists) have shown <i>C<\/i> can be much greater than was previously thought possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lasers were created 60 years ago this year, when three different laser devices were unveiled by independent laboratories in the United States. A few years later, one of these inventors called the unusual light sources \u201ca solution seeking a problem\u201d. Today, the laser has been applied to countless problems in science, medicine and everyday technologies, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115202\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}