• Question: How are lasers used in electronic devices and would they work with out them and what would be the effect?

    Asked by paddypower to Mike, Pip, Tianfu, Tim, Tom on 2 Jul 2012.
    • Photo: Tim Stephens

      Tim Stephens answered on 2 Jul 2012:

      The most common example is the CD player in your hifi or computer. They wouldn’t work without the laser because that’s how the music or data is read off the disk. A less obvious use is that lasers are used to encode the signals that travel through fibre optic communications networks. Without lasers, we’d need to use either electrical signals (slow and expensive) or regular light which can’t carry as much information in one fibre as lasers can.

    • Photo: Philippa Bird

      Philippa Bird answered on 2 Jul 2012:

      Bar codes, too. Read by lasers.

    • Photo: Tom Lister

      Tom Lister answered on 2 Jul 2012:

      I just went to a presentation which talked about lasers used inside chips, to communicate between different parts (instead of tiny wires). It’s not being used yet, but I did some work on this a few years back so the idea has been around for a while.

Comments