High-quality white light produced by four-color laser source (diode lasers could rival LED’s)

[OKIsItJustMe]

https://share.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/laser-light/

Sandia Labs News Releases

October 26, 2011

High-quality white light produced by four-color laser source

Tests show new kid on block – diode lasers – eventually could challenge LEDs for home and industrial lighting supremacy

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The human eye is as comfortable with white light generated by diode lasers as with that produced by increasingly popular light-emitting diodes (LEDs), according to tests conceived at Sandia National Laboratories.

Both technologies pass electrical current through material to generate light, but the simpler LED emits lights only through spontaneous emission. Diode lasers bounce light back and forth internally before releasing it.

The finding is important because LEDs — widely accepted as more efficient and hardier replacements for century-old tungsten incandescent bulb technology — lose efficiency at electrical currents above 0.5 amps. However, the efficiency of a sister technology — the diode laser — improves at higher currents, providing even more light than LEDs at higher amperages.

“What we showed is that diode lasers are a worthy path to pursue for lighting,” said Sandia researcher Jeff Tsao, who proposed the comparative experiment. “Before these tests, our research in this direction was stopped before it could get started. The typical response was, ‘Are you kidding? The color rendering quality of white light produced by diode lasers would be terrible.’ So finally it seemed like, in order to go further, one really had to answer this very basic question first.”

…

[krispos42]

1. Nice to know my idea works in real life

Sometimes I would doodle out future tech stuff in a notebook. Anyway, had envisioned that in the future, when we had much better batteries (super batteries) and much better conductors, we would have a flashlight with four laser beams in: red, green, blue, and infrared. By twisting a dial, you could select red, green, blue, white (red green and blue simultaneously), infrared (for night-vision glasses) and "firestarter", which was all 4 lights on. You passed them through a combining prism, and them some sort of lens arrangement.

I was oddly fascinated by a SureFire catalog I had received in the mail at the time. :-)


Later on I thought to add a UV laser, which you could use to sterilize things in the field as well as make them fluoresce.



:dork: