PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Diamonds are a laser scientist's new best friend

2013-08-07
(Press-News.org) Once a James Bond fantasy, diamond-based lasers are now becoming a reality.

Ground-breaking research is harnessing the unique properties of diamonds to develop a new generation of lasers that could lead to many benefits, from better treatment of skin complaints and diabetes-related eye conditions to improved pollution monitoring and aeronautical engineering.

A University of Strathclyde team has developed a new type of high-performance, ultra-versatile Raman laser* that harnesses diamonds to produce light beams with more power and a wider range of colours than current Raman lasers. These capabilities could open up important new applications. The research is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Although researchers in Australia are also working on innovative diamond-based Raman laser technology, the Strathclyde team has achieved two major world firsts:

The first ever 'tunable' diamond Raman lasers, where the colour of the light can be adjusted to meet specific needs (e.g. the treatment of vascular lesions** requires a yellow/orange light that is difficult to produce with conventional lasers but which is needed to maximise absorption by the lesion while minimising damage to surrounding tissue). Underpinning this breakthrough is the fact that diamond's optical properties enable diamond lasers to produce a range of colours that are hard to generate by conventional means. For example, yellow/orange light which can be used in medicine in the treatment of conditions such as vascular lesions or retinal bleeding of blood vessels at the back of the eyes.

The first ever continuously operating diamond Raman laser. This is important because lasers that can only provide short pulses of light are unsuited to some medical and other applications (e.g. where pulses would damage delicate structures in the eye). In medical treatment for highly sensitive areas therefore, there are situations where using a pulsed laser would create too much acoustic disturbance.

Professor Martin Dawson, who initiated and oversaw the project at the University of Strathclyde's Institute of Photonics, says: "Our new lasers can generate light ranging from the lower end of the ultra-violet part of the electromagnetic spectrum, right through the visible part, up to the middle of the infra-red region. That means they can plug many of the existing gaps in lasers' capabilities."

The silicon and other materials conventionally used in Raman lasers to change the colour of light are limited by the power of the laser and the range of colours they can produce, due to the materials' physical properties. For instance, their relatively limited ability to conduct heat restricts the amount of laser output that can be generated, while their particular optical properties limit their ability to generate certain useful colours of light. By contrast, diamond has unrivalled thermal conductivity which, combined with its unique strength, rigidity and optical properties, make it ideal for use in lasers.

Dr Alan Kemp of the University of Strathclyde, who was Principal Investigator on the project, says: "Exploiting single-crystal diamonds directly in lasers opens up a world of possibilities. A key benefit is that you don't need a big crystal to generate the power you require, so you can make lasers much smaller. Conventional Raman lasers have to incorporate a crystal 3-6 centimetres long. But our new lasers can produce the same amount of power with a diamond crystal just 2-6 millimetres long. That means lasers could be deployed in confined spaces where they currently simply can't go – such as in aeronautical applications and medicine where high-power lasers of particular colours are required but space is at a premium."

Dr Jennifer Hastie led the project to demonstrate the first tunable diamond Raman lasers, achieved by incorporating the Raman crystals into semiconductor disk lasers; a novel type of tunable laser extensively developed at the Institute of Photonics: "Raman lasers work by firing a pump light beam through a crystal, thus creating heat, and as that heat is generated the laser beam is converted to a different colour. If the initial colour of the pump light is tunable, for example that provided by a semiconductor disk laser, we can achieve tuning of the Raman laser colour."

The team has worked closely with UK-based firm Element Six, a world leader in artificial diamond fabrication. As well as being potentially cheaper than natural diamonds, artificial diamonds are perfect for use in lasers because they can be engineered to provide the precise optical properties that are required, something that is difficult in natural diamond.

Professor Dawson says: "We've shown that diamond Raman lasers have the potential to emerge as an important and distinctive technology. The development of innovative laser technology is an incredibly competitive field and EPSRC support has enabled us to achieve genuinely world-leading advances that have enormous potential. We're now aiming to build on our successes to date, with a view to helping a whole new generation of lasers become available for deployment perhaps within 5-10 years."

### There's also an audio slide show on this story which includes images of the diamond lasers. You can find it on the EPSRC YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/epsrcvideo or put 'EPSRC diamond lasers' into the search box on YouTube.

Notes for Editors

The 4-year research programme 'Diamond Raman lasers' ran from 2008 to 2012 and received around £620k in EPSRC support.

The research team has already secured a European Research Council Starting Grant for a follow-on project.

* In a Raman laser, a beam of light of one colour is converted to another colour suited to a particular application. Raman lasers are named after Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, the Indian physicist who played a key role in discovering the 'Raman effect' (a change in the wavelength of light that occurs when a light beam is deflected by molecules – http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/490453/Raman-effect).

** A vascular lesion is an abnormal cluster of blood vessels.

A fictional diamond laser featured in the 1971 James Bond movie 'Diamonds Are Forever'.

Information on Element Six – http://www.e6.com

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is the UK's main agency for funding research in engineering and the physical sciences. EPSRC invests around £800 million a year in research and postgraduate training, to help the nation handle the next generation of technological change. The areas covered range from information technology to structural engineering, and mathematics to materials science. This research forms the basis for future economic development in the UK and improvements for everyone's health, lifestyle and culture. EPSRC works alongside other Research Councils with responsibility for other areas of research. The Research Councils work collectively on issues of common concern via Research Councils UK. http://www.epsrc.ac.uk

For more information on the University of Strathclyde visit: http://www.strath.ac.uk/

For more information, contact:

Dr Alan Kemp, University of Strathclyde, telephone: 0141 548 4120, e-mail: alan.kemp@strath.ac.uk

Images are available from the EPSRC Press Office. Contact e-mail: pressoffice@epsrc.ac.uk, telephone: 01793 444404

Image details:

Alan Kemp.jpg: Dr Alan Kemp
Martin Dawson.jpg: Professor Martin Dawson
Tunable 1.jpg: A tunable laser enabled by diamond cooling
Brass Mount.jpg: The brass mount in the centre houses the diamond crystal
Yellow,orange.jpg: The diamond enables colour conversion into yellow/ orange light
Jennifer Hastie.jpg: Dr Jennifer Hastie


ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Trust thy neighbor

2013-08-07
Increases in population size may lead to a breakdown in social trust, according to Jordan Smith from North Carolina State University in the US. As local populations grow, local elected officials and national news media become less trusted, compared with friends and family, local churches and civic institutions. This 'trust deficit' has implications for long-term environmental and community planning. Smith's study is published online in Springer's journal Human Ecology. Smith studied three southern Appalachian mining communities during a period of change, amid growing ...

Novel beams made of twisted atoms

2013-08-07
Physicists have, for the first time, now built a theoretical construct of beams made of twisted atoms. These findings by Armen Hayrapetyan and colleagues at Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg in Germany are about to be published in EPJ D. These so-called atomic Bessel beams can, in principle, have potential applications in quantum communication as well as in atomic and nuclear processes. The concept for twisted atom beams stems from a similar approach with twisted photon beams, which are currently used as optical tweezers, for instance. It was later extended to twisted ...

Engineers gain new insight into turbulence that could lead to significant global energy savings

2013-08-07
Scientists have developed a new understanding of how turbulence works, which could help to optimise vehicle performance and save billions in global energy costs. Dr Ati Sharma, a senior lecturer in aerodynamics and flight mechanics at the University of Southampton, has been working in collaboration with Beverley McKeon, professor of aeronautics and associate director of the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to build models of turbulent flow. Recently, they developed a new and improved way of predicting the composition ...

Quasar observed in 6 separate light reflections

2013-08-07
Quasars are active black holes -- primarily from the early universe. Using a special method where you observe light that has been bent by gravity on its way through the universe, a group of physics students from the Niels Bohr Institute have observed a quasar whose light has been deflected and reflected in six separate images. This is the first time a quasar has been observed with so many light reflections. The results are published in the scientific journal, Astrophysical Journal. INFORMATION: Article in Astrophysical Journal: http://stacks.iop.org/0004-637X/773/146 For ...

Self-healing solar cells 'channel' natural processes

2013-08-07
To understand how solar cells heal themselves, look no further than the nearest tree leaf or the back of your hand. The "branching" vascular channels that circulate life-sustaining nutrients throughout leaves and hands serve as the inspiration for solar cells that can restore themselves efficiently and inexpensively. In a new paper, North Carolina State University researchers Orlin Velev and Hyung-Jun Koo show that creating solar cell devices with channels that mimic organic vascular systems can effectively reinvigorate solar cells whose performance ...

New insights into the 1-in-a-million lightning called 'ball lightning'

2013-08-07
One of the rare scientific reports on the rarest form of lightning -- ball lightning -- describes better ways of producing this mysterious phenomenon under the modern laboratory conditions needed to explain it. The new study on a phenomenon that puzzled and perplexed the likes of Aristotle 2,300 years ago and Nikola Tesla a century ago appears in ACS' The Journal of Physical Chemistry A. C. Michael Lindsay and colleagues explain that ball lightning consists of a floating, glowing ball that may drift eerily through the sky and then explode violently, sometimes injuring ...

A greener, more sustainable source of ingredients for widely used plastics

2013-08-07
A new process can convert a wide variety of vegetable and animal fats and oils -- ranging from lard to waste cooking oil -- into a key ingredient for making plastics that currently comes from petroleum, scientists say. Their report on the first-of-its-kind process appears in the journal ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering. Douglas Neckers and Maria Muro-Small explain that many of the plastics found in hundreds of everyday products begin with a group of chemical raw materials termed olefins that come from petroleum. They include ethylene, propylene and butadiene, ...

Gold 'nanoprobes' hold the key to treating killer diseases

2013-08-07
Researchers at the University of Southampton, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Cambridge, have developed a technique to help treat fatal diseases more effectively. Dr Sumeet Mahajan and his group at the Institute for Life Sciences at Southampton are using gold nanoprobes to identify different types of cells, so that they can use the right ones in stem cell therapies. Stem cell therapy is in its infancy, but has the potential to change the way we treat cancer and other life-threatening diseases, by replacing damaged or diseased cells with healthy ones. ...

New high-tech laser method allows DNA to be inserted 'gently' into living cells

2013-08-07
WASHINGTON, Aug. 7—The applications of gene therapy and genetic engineering are broad: everything from pet fish that glow red to increased crop yields worldwide to cures for many of the diseases that plague humankind. But realizing them always starts with solving the same basic scientific question—how to "transfect" a cell by inserting foreign DNA into it. Many methods already exist for doing this, but they tend to be clumsy and destructive, not allowing researchers to precisely control how and when they insert the DNA or requiring them to burn through large numbers of ...

Loss of MicroRNA decoy might contribute to development of soft-tissue sarcoma

2013-08-07
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Researchers have discovered a novel mechanism responsible for the loss of a critical tumor-suppressor gene in rhabdomyosarcoma and other soft-tissue sarcomas, rare cancers that strike mainly children and often respond poorly to treatment. Their cause is largely unknown. Knowledge of the mechanism could guide the development of more effective therapies for these malignancies, say researchers who led the study at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC – James). The ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Public shows greater acceptance of RSV vaccine as vaccine hesitancy appears to have plateaued

Unraveling the power and influence of language

Gene editing tool reduces Alzheimer’s plaque precursor in mice

TNF inhibitors prevent complications in kids with Crohn's disease, recommended as first-line therapies

Twisted Edison: Bright, elliptically polarized incandescent light

Structural cell protein also directly regulates gene transcription

Breaking boundaries: Researchers isolate quantum coherence in classical light systems

Brain map clarifies neuronal connectivity behind motor function

Researchers find compromised indoor air in homes following Marshall Fire

Months after Colorado's Marshall Fire, residents of surviving homes reported health symptoms, poor air quality

Identification of chemical constituents and blood-absorbed components of Shenqi Fuzheng extract based on UPLC-triple-TOF/MS technology

'Glass fences' hinder Japanese female faculty in international research, study finds

Vector winds forecast by numerical weather prediction models still in need of optimization

New research identifies key cellular mechanism driving Alzheimer’s disease

Trends in buprenorphine dispensing among adolescents and young adults in the US

Emergency department physicians vary widely in their likelihood of hospitalizing a patient, even within the same facility

Firearm and motor vehicle pediatric deaths— intersections of age, sex, race, and ethnicity

Association of state cannabis legalization with cannabis use disorder and cannabis poisoning

Gestational hypertension, preeclampsia, and eclampsia and future neurological disorders

Adoption of “hospital-at-home” programs remains concentrated among larger, urban, not-for-profit and academic hospitals

Unlocking the mysteries of the human gut

High-quality nanodiamonds for bioimaging and quantum sensing applications

New clinical practice guideline on the process for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease or a related form of cognitive impairment or dementia

Evolution of fast-growing fish-eating herring in the Baltic Sea

Cryptographic protocol enables secure data sharing in the floating wind energy sector

Can drinking coffee or tea help prevent head and neck cancer?

Development of a global innovative drug in eye drop form for treating dry age-related macular degeneration

Scientists unlock secrets behind flowering of the king of fruits

Texas A&M researchers illuminate the mysteries of icy ocean worlds

Prosthetic material could help reduce infections from intravenous catheters

[Press-News.org] Diamonds are a laser scientist's new best friend