there's one extra application of indium
which was really quite important in my
own research in fact he got us onto the
front cover of the journal new scientist
yo you can see this is me with hair
slightly less gray than now no periodic
table time what was I thinking of we
were using a material called indium
antimonide that's an alloy of indium in
group 3 and antimony in group 5 which
makes a so-called semiconductor we were
using this to make a tunable infrared
laser or rather we were using technology
developed by a company we Sean a fixed
wavelength infrared laser onto this
crystal which was kept at very low
temperature four degrees absolute in a
high magnetic field and as you tune the
magnetic field you could get tunable
infrared radiation had a wonderful name
spin flip laser or in fact spin flip
Raman laser it never worked
enormous ly well but what was important
was that he got me and my PhD supervisor
and collaborator Jim Turner really
interested in infrared lasers got us on
the cover and this has had a big effect
in the work of our research group and
now my colleague Mike George here in
Nottingham has got wonderful infrared
lasers and doing terrific experiments
and it all had its origin long ago with
this magazine article
and in fact I got the cell we used to
use here the cells made out of copper
and it's cooled with liquid nitrogen
that goes through one of these pipes and
out of the other there's a little
chamber inside with windows that are
transparent to infrared light