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Fighting terrorism with lasers
Samples of mustard gas and the nerve agent VX cleaned up with lasers...
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I'm an online editor at Physics World. I write about applied physics research, and generally "fly the flag" for the practical and commercial side of physics within the Physics World team. I joined Physics World in 2008, shortly after completing my PhD in experimental atomic physics at Durham University, but I’m not from these parts originally: I grew up in Kansas and did my undergraduate degree in the US. Aside from industry physics, I'm interested in science policy and every now and then I get nostalgic about soldering circuits and fiddling around with lasers. Outside work I enjoy hiking, reading about history and becoming less incompetent at karate.
Samples of mustard gas and the nerve agent VX cleaned up with lasers...
By Margaret Harris Fifty years ago today, a little-known scientist working in an underfunded lab in California set off a scientific and technological revolution. On 16 May 1960, Theodore Maiman and his assistant Irnee d’Haenens succeeded in coaxing a beam of coherent light out of a flashlamp-pumped crystal of pink ruby. The laser had arrived. […]
The laser at 50: physicists will have a defining role to play in the next 50 years of the laser, says Tom Baer
Five experts discuss the past, present and future of lasers in research, communications, medicine, manufacturing and space science
The main UK political parties are all failing the Condorcet test...
Margaret Harris goes on the ultimate physics-adventure
What Gordon Brown and Wolfgang Pauli (may) have in common...
There's something weirdly retro about laser light shows...