The “One Shot” program originally aimed to give snipers the power to hit a target from 2000 meters away in winds as high as 40 miles per hour. In the first phases of the 3-year-old program, shooters used prototype rifles dressed with lasers and fancy computer hardware to do damage from 1,100 meters away in 18-mile-an-hour winds. The scope-mounted lasers can “see” wind turbulence in the path of the bullet and feed the data to computers, enabling real-time calculation of — and compensation for — the wind-blown trajectory.
read more at Danger Room | Wired.com.
The physics and laser show at Lund University will be taking to the stage at the World Expo in Shanghai. The European Commission has invited the physics researchers, who are now packing the three tons of equipment for the flight to China.
The popular physics and laser show in Lund has been performed just over 1 100 times for more than 220 000 people over the 15 years of its existence. Now it is going on a long-distance trip to the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai.
read more at Lund University.
Europe requires space-borne laser instruments that can provide information on the vertical scale of volcanic ash clouds.
Read more at
BBC News – ‘Space laser tech needed’ to measure volcanic ash.
GOLETA, Calif.–BUSINESS WIRE–Kaai, Inc., a world leader in commercialization of green and blue laser diodes, announced shipments of its new blue laser diode product for display and specialty applications. The company will present a product introduction for the blue laser and an update on its green laser commercialization at Projection Summit 2010 in Las Vegas, Nevada on June 7, 2010.
Kaai’s new blue laser diode is designed for integration into portable applications such as embedded and companion pico projectors and features 60 mW of 445 nm single mode output power in a compact TO‐38 package. The lasers operate with high efficiency and require minimal power consumption over a broad temperature range, meeting the demanding requirements of consumer projection displays, defense pointers and illuminators, biomedical instrumentation and therapeutics, and industrial imaging applications. Kaai’s blue lasers are based on the company’s patented and proprietary InGaN semiconductor technology and are fabricated on innovative GaN substrates.
Kaai’s presentation at Projection Summit 2010 is entitled “The Emergence of Direct Emitting Green and Blue Semiconductor Lasers for Display Applications.” For additional information, see http://www.projectionsummit.com.
via Business Wire.
Airborne lasers have “stripped” away thick rain forests to reveal new images of an ancient Maya metropolis that's far bigger than anyone had thought.
An April 2009 flyover of the Maya city of Caracol used Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) equipment—which bounces laser beams off the ground—to help scientists construct a 3-D map of the settlement in western Belize. The survey revealed previously unknown buildings, roads, and other features in just four days,
via Pictures: Massive Maya City Revealed by Lasers.
Quantum dot laser featuring an active layer containing high-density arrays of quantum dots
Fujitsu and the University of Tokyo today announced the world’s first quantum dot laser -based 25 Gbps high-speed data transmission.
via Physorg
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A 5-micrometer glass bead levitated in air by a single laser beam from below. This optical trap is formed by the force from the laser beam and the gravitational force on the bead. Tongcang Li, et. al. used a similar optical trap to study the Brownian motion of a trapped bead in air with ultra-high resolution. Their paper is published in Science.
via The University of Texas at Austin.
