After 42 years, British scientists have caught up with the world of James Bond and produced diamond-based lasers, it was announced yesterday.
In the 1971 James Bond movie a super-villain planned to use a giant diamond laser to hold the world hostage.
But the new lasers are more likely to turn up in hospitals and clinics.
Researchers at Strathclyde University, Scotland, have announced the first ever tunable diamond Raman laser – allowing adjustment of light colour.
This can be tuned to produce the yellow-orange light needed for vascular treatment or of blood vessels in the eye, the scientists say.
It is also the first ever continuously operating diamond Raman laser, they say, and does not need to operate with short pulses of light.
A Raman laser converts light of one colour to another colour and is named after physicist Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman.
Researcher Dr Alan Kemp said the new lasers used diamond crystals as small as two millimetres – compared with crystals of three centimetres in conventional lasers.
He said: "Exploiting single-crystal diamonds directly in lasers opens up a world of possibilities. A key benefit is that you don’t need a big crystal to generate the power you require, so you can make lasers much smaller."
Fellow researcher Professor Martin Dawson said: "Our new lasers can generate light ranging from the lower end of the ultra-violet part of the electromagnetic spectrum, right through the visible part, up to the middle of the infra-red region.
"That means they can plug many of the existing gaps in lasers’ capabilities."
Leave a Reply