I am in the middle of a huge dilemma, I really don’t like jellyfish, they freak me out,
but I love lasers… they’re so cool!
And this new science is making lasers with jellyfish!?
AHHH!!
Hey photonic reflectors, Trace here for DNews.
When lasers were first invented, they were called “a solution looking for a problem.”
In the decades since then, we’ve found a number of ways to make lasers useful.
Barcode scanners, industrial cutting, surgeries, pointing at things...
you name it!
Now, physicists and bioengineers are collaborating to help us make new, even more specialized
lasers… thanks to proteins from jellyfish.
But first... lasers were theorized in 1917 in a paper by Einstein, and first accomplished
in 1960 by T.H.
Maiman.
LASER is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.
Lasers make light, but not like regular light bulbs.
In a regular lightbulb, electrons are pushed through a filament, causing them to get excited.
That excitement causes them to throw little photons of light and heat energy every which
way!
It’s chaos!
Lasers are far more precise…
A laser takes the same principle of emitting light, but instead of going every which way,
it’s an organized, tightly packed, beam of photons.
This organization requires specific substances to emit their photons in a specific way so
the photons are monochromatic, coherent and directional!
Put simply, a lightbulb is a running herd of people, but a laser is a marching army.
Different substances produce different wavelengths of light, and different types of lasers are
good for different things.
Red laser light can be used in sensors, spectrometers and CD-players and can be made by exciting
a helium-neon gas or garnet.
Blue or violet lasers can be used for data storage applications (it’s what’s in a
blu-ray player) and in medical and and are made by exciting gallium nitride…
But I digress.
One of the most advanced laser types yet invented is a polariton laser.
It’s created by exciting the atoms of a supercooled Bose-Einstein condensate (a crazy
state of matter) to create half-matter, half-light quasiparticles...
Yeah.
It’s pretty insane science, and not the easiest thing to do.
These polariton lasers can be used in quantum physics, to tag cancer cells, or to make data
transfers faster, but they’re so hard to make!
Supercooling ain’t easy!
Which brings us back to jellyfish (shudder).
In 2011, scientists pulsed low energy light onto lab-grown cells containing a green fluorescent
protein (GFP) from the Aequorea victoria jellyfish.
By putting them into a mirrored chamber, the cells created an organized beam of monochromatic
photons!
Green laser light!
These were the first biological lasers!
Now in this new 2016 study, the researchers took that GFP and grew it on a bed of e.coli
bacteria -- creating enhanced GFP (eGFP) that glows way brighter.
// enhance *air typing* // they created a 500 nanometer-thin film of this eGFP, placed
it into a mirrored housing…
pulsed it with light…
aaaaand!
VOILA!!
A polariton laser for quantum applications at room temperature!
No supercooling required!
Easy!
See, the reason they needed supercooled lasers in the first place was to keep the photons
from moving around too much -- super-cold particles behave better.
But, the jellyfish proteins are barrel-shaped, causing the photons to align perfectly.
It only makes green light, but the hunt is on for more glowing proteins…
coral have one that glows red…
From jellyfish, to lasers, to bioengineering to quantum physics.
I’m jelly.
That’s super cool.
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Of course, this new study is predicated on the fact that the jellyfish had glowing cells
in the first place!
If you’re wondering why some animals glow, go watch this video.
And tell us in the comments if this science blew your mind a little bit, because it did
mine and please subscribe for more mindblowing science.