They pack the power of a nuclear reactor in a shoebox size device, delivered in a fraction of a millionth of a millionth of a second. Femtosecond lasers are the source of many groundbreaking applications in Science, Industry and Medicine. Here are some of the coolest:
Eternal Storage
In a few million years, the only thing that may remain from our civilization could be the Superman movie. A team of researcher at Microsoft has developed a new storage technology, encoding the movie inside glass with femtosecond lasers. The team claims 360 TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1,000°C and virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature (13.8 billion years at 190°C). Can’t wait for the end of the universe so we can check this claim!
Mind Reading
High speed, small size femtosecond lasers enable in depth, non intrusive imaging of thousands of individual neurons. Recent scientific research, coupled to efficient data analysis, starts to correlate these images with animal behavior. In addition, the recent fields of optogenetics opens the way to direct control of individual neurons with light. Amazing or scary ?
Transmutation
Forget the alchemist dream of turning lead into gold, the new philosopher’s stone is there. 2018 Physics Nobel prize Gerard Mourou envisions a future when thousands of high power femtosecond lasers, coherently combined, will be able to transmute long life, high toxicity radionucleides into shorter lifetime elements. The physics is there, the basic technology is there, scaling up requires a huge industrial effort.