Published in Physics World, 16 Jun 2010
A new type of laser that emits “dark” pulses could provide better signals for telecommunications, according to physicists in the US who have created the device. The dark pulses, which consist of intensity dips in an otherwise continuous beam of laser light, are effectively the opposite of the bright bursts in a normal pulsed laser.
“The laser emits a brief pulse of darkness, if you will,” explains one of the researchers Richard Mirin, who is at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado. “And so you can think of it as a continuous-wave laser that has a really fast shutter in front of it.” […]
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