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Light reflecting light?

bradnorwood

Is there a way to get a laser to reflect another laser or any wavelength signal to,reflect light? Radio wave? Magnetic wave? Etc.? The goal is to reflect light with something other than a physical object...

  • 0

    For mortals, the answer is: NO.

     

    If you're in for a challenge, you can make sound waves in a medium that create a grating that diffracts the light. I doubt that you can extend and compress a vacuum enough to make this happen. I suspect that it should in theory be possible by shaking your black hole back and forth at a few teraHz. :-)

     

    To give you an order of magnitude: you need about 400W of FM-radio frequency (about 100MHz) sound waves in a crystal the size of a hand to diffract 10 micron infra red. You should be aiming for about 20 times higher frequencies to do this with visible light....


    But out of context I can't be sure if your "not bouncing off an object" is true if it bounces off the waves inside a crystal.... There IS an object in the deflection place, which is probably not what you want. But the "bouncing" does not happen OFF the object....

  • 0 in reply to rew

    I had an idea to make a laser grid and if we can generate reflection to travel with the beam, we can make it turn its direction to make the grid from one laser instead of a bunch of mirrors and lasers... it's only a theory but I believe it is possible and could seed many new technologies from this... Think of it as using a laser to make a PCB board connection instead of copper... we are using lasers to send signals and measurement...