By Peter Weiss
Is there really treasure at the end of the rainbow? Yes, say scientists who have fired ultrashort laser pulses into a novel fiber that transforms one color into many. The remarkable spectrum exiting the fiber, when applied as a sort of ruler, takes the ordeal out of measuring visible-light frequencies. Before long, every university and industrial laboratory may routinely use the technique to achieve precision now attained only at national standards laboratories, the inventors predict.
To many scientists, that improvement’s as good as gold. “Completely revolutionary,” comments Alan Madej of the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa. “It’s the biggest development in precision electromagnetic measurement since people started to measure laser frequencies” in the early 1970s, he adds.