No, I ain’t fooling. Nature has produced laser-type light. In a Peacock’s tail.
https://www.sciencealert.com/mind-blowing-discovery-peacocks-have-lasers-in-their-tails
In a mind-blowing first for the animal kingdom, they discovered the eyespots on the fowl’s fabulous feathers have unique properties that align light waves by bouncing them back and forth, effectively turning them into yellow-green lasers.
Isn’t nature amazing? And humans thought they invented lasers.
I once had a conversation with Coyote out in a field; which ended with her saying “Humph. Humans think they invented everything.” and stalking off.
Most lasers do, for practical reasons, bounce light waves back and forth, but that’s neither necessary nor sufficient for a laser. It sounds like they’re just describing colors arising from diffraction, but it’s been known for ages that bird feathers do that.
Paging @CalMeacham , our resident optics expert.
Who pronounces the name of CalMeacham?
I’ve only taken a quick look over the article in question. Like Chronos, I was inclined to think some journalist had gotten too enthusiastic about diffraction and interference, and said it was a “laser”. I’ve seen it before. But this article appears to be claiming that there wasn’t just interference, but actual optical cavities. And not just optical cavities, but cavities with gain, producing lasing.
Color me skeptical (with interference colors, if necessary). The interference colors are a given, and common enough in nature. There might even be structures that form actual resonator-like cavities, but I’ll have to have a closer look.
But every time I’ve encountered a report about “lasers” in nature, it hasn’t been true. At best it’s been Amplified Spontaneous Emission (ASE), without a resonator. Or some other non-laser phenomenon. In order to get an actual laser , even given the presence of an aligned optical cavity, you need a gain material and some way to pump it. That’s what I’m most skeptical about, and I’ll have to dig out the original article to see what they’re saying.
But I’ve read articles by people I know, with actual degrees in optics, in which they claim lasing in nature that I just don’t buy.
How about the Martian laser?
So if you shoot a peacock into space, it becomes Jewish?
Well, haing looked at the cite in that report, I don’t see anything about lasers in peacock tails. The basic article of interest is an examination of exactly what interference effect leads to the colors in the tail feathers:
Note that this paper is six years old.
There’s a link to a paper about making mini-lasers using the structures of butterfly wings with gainmaterial added, but no suggestion that this occurs in nature.
So I think Chronos called it – it’s about interference effects in the feathers of a peaock’s tail. I suppose you can draw parallels between intereference between planes and a laser resonator, but that’s far from a stable resonant cavity, which is far from a resonant cavity full of gain material, which is far from a pumped gain medium, which is far from pumped gain material with a population inversion, which is still removed from one i which the gain exceeds the loss.
Beowull – what Martian laser? Do you have a cite?
I swear when I first read about this, the article mentioned that it was the most powerful laser in the known universe, but I can’t find any mention of the power output now.
Peacocks are nasty, noisy, animals that you don’t want. Get a couple and find out. You will want to shoot them but you can’t eat them and they shit everywhere, on everything. Raising peacocks is one of those things that you will wish somebody warned you about first. I imagine peacocks when I read a story with velociraptors in it. Your neighbors are going to hate you.
Did it sound like Johnny Cash?
Nope. Not sure she sounded like anything, exactly – voices in my mind don’t have much sound to them. But certainly not like Johnny Cash.
Did Cash say something about humans thinking we invented everything?
No. He voiced the space coyote during Homer’s trip.
Ah.
Mine was a lot less woo-ish. At least, if you ignore the fact that I was having a conversation with Coyote at all.
This is another of those natural “lasers” that are actually cases of Amplified Spontaneous emission. There’s no resonator – no laser cavity no structure producing a spectrally narrowed directional beam. You get a population inversion, and any random transition of that wavelength can excite a beam that picks up energy as it traverses the region of gain material with the inversion. The result is a pretty broad beam with a linewidth determined by the properties of the gain medium. There’s no feedback – the beam only goes in one direction. Those ultraviolet lasers they’ve seen in some stars is the same kind of thing
Of course, there are plenty of such ASE-based “lasers” right here on Earth. A lot of nitrogen lasers are really ASE, not true cavity-defined lasers. The nuclear bomb-pumped X-ray laser that Edward Teller championed was also an ASE laser.