[SCIENCE!] Remember All Those Bendy Lasers In Anime?

[Epsilon]

And how we used to laugh at them?

So... yeah.

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Epsilon

They are using bendy laser to summon lightning bolts. Science is awesome.

[Sofaspud]

Here's a slightly more detailed explanation:

http://focus.aps.org/story/v20/st19

Excerpt:

As with the Bessel beam's diffraction-free "propagation," light doesn't actually propagate along the curved path. The beam is the pattern
created by interference of light from the 500,000 carefully-phased pixels of the SLM. Still, Mordechai Segev of the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa
is impressed. "It's a beautiful piece of work," he says. Segev envisions using similar phasing tricks in situations where multiple light beams
are needed to create a specific light effect at a precise distance from the source. "If you engineer the phase the right way, you will only have white
light where the pulses meet. Imagine if you did something like that in the atmosphere," where Airy-like beams could improve LIDAR, a type of laser-based
radar used to study the atmosphere.

Now, the cool bit, to me, is that this application could lead to free-floating displays in the air, like sci-fi holograms. If you can produce
white light at any particular point in space, you can produce red, green, and blue light as well, one would assume.

Science is indeed awesome.

--sofaspud
--"Listening to your kid is the audio equivalent of a Salvador Dali painting, Spud." --OpMegs

[kentmagus]

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