Lasers are models of meticulous manufacturing processes and precision alignment.
An agglomeration of randomly ordered nanocrystals is about as far from precision manufacturing as can be imagined, but researchers have observed lasing in just such a cluster of zinc oxide nanocrystals. The disorder not only does not interfere with the lasing, but is responsible for it. If development efforts live up to the promise of the early measurements, the microlasers could find applications as sources for optical computers or photonic crystals. Courtesy of Hui Cao. Hui Cao and her team at Northwestern University had postulated that strong scattering in a highly disordered structure would result in a mean free path of about half a wavelength.