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To: Guy Gordon who wrote (2032)	2/12/2000 7:39:00 PM
From: 993racer	Respond to of 10713

Lasers and Microcraters Innovations With Wavelengths, Data Storage Special to ABCNEWS.com EXPLOSIVE DATA STORAGE The need for information storage is exploding. Now some Harvard University researchers are taking that idea literally. They are using an extremely fast laser to trigger tiny explosions that create ?microcraters? to encode data. Physics professor Eric Mazur uses red laser pulses lasting a mere 100 femtoseconds to explode glass and other translucent materials. One femtosecond is a billionth of a millionth of a second; there are as many femtoseconds in a second as there are minutes in the age of the universe. Mazur?s graduate student Chris Schaffer took the concept a step further, building a laser that can fire every 40 billionths of a second to create layer after layer of microcraters, much like the pits that provide storage on a CD-ROM but with the third dimension yielding a hundredfold boost in information density. Harvard has patented this potential application of microexplosions for data storage. Other possible uses: eye surgery and optical computing, where the microblasts could carve tiny spaces required to engineer optical circuits. TWO-TONE LASER One key defining property of lasers is that they each produce a single, pure color or are tunable within a limited range of wavelengths. Now researchers at Lucent?s Bell Labs have built the first laser capable of emitting light at two distinct wavelengths. The two-tone laser was built by Bell Labs researcher Claire Gmachl and her colleagues. At its heart is a semiconducting crystal that does double duty, emitting one wavelength when a positive voltage is applied and a different one when the voltage is negative. Since the polarity can be switched rapidly, this versatile laser can do the work of two for such applications as pollution detection, which requires one color of light that?s absorbed by the target gas and a second color for reference. The prototype device emits midinfrared light, which is most appropriate for such sensing; future devices could produce different wavelengths for medical and communications uses. abcnews.go.com