New anti-laser absorbs, rather than emits, light beam

New York Times : In an elegant melding of theoretical and experimental physics, scientists at Yale University have taken the basic function of a laser and flipped it around—producing a device that absorbs, rather than emits, a beam of light, writes Henry Fountain for the New York Times. The device, which the scientists call a “coherent perfect absorber” or, more popularly, an anti-laser, may lead to the development of new kinds of switches, filters, and other components that could be useful in hybrid optical-electronic computers under development, among other applications. A. Douglas Stone, a theoretical physicist at Yale, and colleagues published their results last week in Science.