Physicists have long studied soap bubbles for their extraordinary geometric properties as minimal surfaces, for the way they oscillate and for the beautiful interference patterns that appear on their surfaces.
So it would be easy to think that soap bubbles have little more to give in terms of exotic physics and no new applications beyond the bathtub. But that would be wrong.
Enter Zala Potŏcnik and Matjaž Humar at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, who have found a way to turn soap bubbles into lasers. With this innovation, they’ve opened up a whole new world of potential applications for the humble soap bubble.
First some background. Lasers produce light through a process of optical amplification in which the passage of photons through a medium stimulates the emission of more photons. The key components in a laser are the medium, which amplifies light, and a process of optical feedback to ...
