Lasers & Laser Systems

Tractor beams — the ability to trap and move objects using laser light — are not just “Star Trek” science fiction, and are not beyond current technology. A team of NASA scientists has won funding to study the concept of remotely capturing planetary or atmospheric particles, and delivering them to a...

Flight lasers and test laserFibertekHerndon, VA703-471-7671www.fibertek.com Managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) mission is scheduled to launch in 2016. The satellite will replace the original ICESat...

Temp Tracker and Temp Tracker 12 ch (single-channel and 12-channel versions) programs are designed for use with an atomic gravity gradiometer. They support the stable operation of the injection-locked slave laser(s) in an autonomous regime. Due to changes of environmental conditions and...

A team led by Jun Ye, a physicist at JILA - a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado at Boulder - demonstrated an optical technique for simultaneously identifying tiny amounts of a broad range of molecules in the breath, potentially enabling a fast, low-cost...

Engineers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed and tested a laser-based ranging system to assess the performance of automobile collision warning systems. Industry and the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) will use the technology to develop safety systems that alert drivers to...

A tiny sensor that can detect magnetic field changes as small as 70 Femtoteslas — equivalent to the brain waves of a person daydreaming — has been demonstrated at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The sensor could operate on a single AA battery and reduce the costs of non-invasive biomagnetic...

As noted in the article "Mini CW Lasers Enable Next-Generation Bioinstrumentation" in May's edition of Photonics Tech Briefs (PTB), continuous-wave (CW) lasers have helped advance research in fields such as cell sorting and DNA sequencing. Written by Jurgen Niederhofer, product manager of Newport's Spectra-Physics Lasers...

Using lasers and tuning forks, researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have developed a chemical weapon agent sensing technique called Quartz Laser Photo-Acoustic Sensing (QPAS) that promises to meet or exceed current and emerging defense and homeland security chemical detection requirements. The instrument is...