Enlarge (credit: Michael Coghlan)

The problem with scientific papers is that they hide about half of the interesting stuff. Recently, a group of scientists set out to directly measure a property of a laser, something that goes by the exciting-sounding name of “spatial hole burning.” In the process, though, they discovered how to turn a laser into a very high-speed microwave device, a discovery that may make the next generations of Wi-Fi and mobile data much easier to implement.

Was this discovery an accident, or did the scientists know that the application potential was there before they started? The paper is silent on the issue. But are we seriously going to put a laser in every cell phone?

Your laser is full of holes

When you form a picture of light from a laser, you might imagine something like light from a laser pointer: red or green, a nice directed beam, possibly a bit sparkly when you shine it on the wall. Lasers emit light with a single pure color, right? Unfortunately, life is not that simple.