New
York Times: In an elegant melding of theoretical and
experimental physics, scientists at Yale University have taken
the basic function of a laser and flipped it
around—producing a device that absorbs, rather than
emits, a beam of light, writes Henry Fountain for the
New York Times. The device, which the scientists call
a “coherent perfect absorber” or, more popularly,
an anti-laser, may lead to the development of new kinds of
switches, filters, and other components that could be useful in
hybrid optical-electronic computers under development, among
other applications. A. Douglas Stone, a theoretical
physicist at Yale, and colleagues
published
their results last week in
Science.
