RUBBER-LIKE lasers may soon be producing light shows worthy of the best night
clubs. Simply stretching the laser changes the colour of the light it produces
from red to green or any colour in between.
“This is the first example of an easy, cheap, adaptable device which can be
used to tune a laser quickly,” says Robert Eason from the Optoelectronics
Research Centre at the University of Southampton.
The stretchy laser could dramatically increase the capacity of fibre-optic
links, because the more wavelengths or colours you can send down a fibre, the
more information it can carry. It is possible…
