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Elusive Green Laser Is Missing Ingredient For Amazing Displays
Lee Gomes, The Wall Street Journal PORTALS, February 13, 2008
Excerpts from the article:
Imagine a projection-style TV that fits in your hand, but which can fill a whole wall with a full-color, high-resolution picture that's as bright as any you've seen. Or a light bulb an inch or two high that fills a room with pleasing white light, but without the heat and wasted energy of an incandescent bulb.
In terms of technology, we have two of the three things needed to make those happen. Already, there are efficient, inexpensive red and blue lasers. The former have been around as long as CDs, and blue lasers are now entering the home en masse inside high-resolution Blu-ray and HD DVD video players.
What's missing is a low-cost green laser to complete the red-blue-green trifecta that is the basis for most video displays and cool, "natural" room light. So important are green lasers that many physicists and material scientists talk about them in holy-grail terms. It's not quite a race to the moon, but the green-laser challenge is attracting a growing global research community, including, as of November, the U.S. government.
That's when Darpa, the famed Pentagon technology-funding agency, unveiled a green-laser initiative that included grants for nine universities and research centers, mostly in the U.S. but also in Poland.
...Among the numerous outfits world-wide working on the problem, work is "collegial but not collaborative," said Noble Johnson, of the Palo Alto Research Center, a Darpa grant recipient. Everyone involved knows that cracking the problem will mean not only scientific plaudits, but also a steady stream of royalties from the products that will ensue...
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