Making Lasers from Dust
Anyone with optics experience knows that dust should be avoided as much as possible. It can contaminate optical surfaces, degrading performance and, sometimes — on the output facet of a diode laser, for example — cause disastrous optical damage. Although dust sometimes absorbs light, its chief sin is scattering light; that is, changing its propagation direction in a random fashion.
But it turns out that this same random scattering process — the nemesis of conventional lasers — can be...
Photonics Spectra, February 2007