That's... pretty vague. If it's a "time-reversed laser", it's implying this is a beam which can be projected which cancels out light it encounters:
>“By just tinkering with the phases of the beams, magically it turns ‘black’ in this narrow wavelength range,” says team member A. Douglas Stone, a physicist at Yale University. “It’s an amazing trick.”
If it's a material:
>Instead of amplifying light into coherent pulses, as a laser does, an antilaser absorbs light beams zapped into it.
>Stone and his colleagues thought up the antilaser while wondering what might happen if they replaced the material inside a laser that reflects photons — the “gain medium” — with a material that absorbs light. In the right configuration, the absorbing material sucks up most of the photons sent into it, while the remaining light waves cancel out by interfering with one another.
then it's... an electrically-operated optical switch? Why not just state that?
If it's an optical switch, it's pretty awesome, granted, but the article doesn't seem to be implying that except in a very low-importance way (and still ambiguous about beam / material). They even mention that, as it only absorbs a specific frequency, it can't be used (efficiently) in solar panels... which implies you can extract energy from the absorbed light?
Even though the antilaser absorbs perfectly, it does so only at specific wavelengths of light...
That would make it more than an optical switch, which switches broad bandwidths of light on or off. This implies that it is a perfect "notch" filter (absorbs only a specific frequency/wavelength) that can also be turned on and off. Notch filters are very important in communications technology. Being able to turn a perfect notch filter on and off is very interesting.
One possible application would be, I think, detection of certain materials provided that antilasers are cheap to build. In other words, cheaper replacement for spectral analysis.
>“By just tinkering with the phases of the beams, magically it turns ‘black’ in this narrow wavelength range,” says team member A. Douglas Stone, a physicist at Yale University. “It’s an amazing trick.”
If it's a material:
>Instead of amplifying light into coherent pulses, as a laser does, an antilaser absorbs light beams zapped into it.
>Stone and his colleagues thought up the antilaser while wondering what might happen if they replaced the material inside a laser that reflects photons — the “gain medium” — with a material that absorbs light. In the right configuration, the absorbing material sucks up most of the photons sent into it, while the remaining light waves cancel out by interfering with one another.
then it's... an electrically-operated optical switch? Why not just state that?
If it's an optical switch, it's pretty awesome, granted, but the article doesn't seem to be implying that except in a very low-importance way (and still ambiguous about beam / material). They even mention that, as it only absorbs a specific frequency, it can't be used (efficiently) in solar panels... which implies you can extract energy from the absorbed light?
WTF Wired, make more sense.