This New Diamond Mirror Can Withstand A 10-kW Laser Beam

Diamond is known to be the finest and the most strengthened non-metal that can be utilized to cut hard materials. It has made its name as the most influential element to be used in making jewelry as well. Thus, by recognizing these properties, researchers at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have assembled and fabricated an awe-inspiring diamond mirror that can endure an exceedingly large amount of power from continuous high-wave lasers and will still not break. This breakthrough would allow this diamond mirror to be used in a lot of daily life applications due to its durable and indestructible nature.

This strong and sturdy diamond mirror can not only be used in the manufacturing of aircraft but also cars, trains, and even ships. It can withstand about 10 KW of the laser beam, and researchers have proved it through experiments with a Navy Laser. No damage has been done to the diamond mirror, irrespective of how strong the laser beam was. However, Marko Loncar, the Tiantai Lin Professor of Electrical Engineering at SEAS and senior author of the paper, said, “Our one-material mirror approach eliminates the thermal stress issues that are detrimental to conventional mirrors, formed by multi-material stacks when they are irradiated with large optical powers. This approach has the potential to improve or create new applications for high-power lasers.”

On the other hand, researchers first designed this diamond mirror with the concept of engraving nano-scale structures to be used in the quantum optics industry. But they required a very strong material for this purpose, and given this, they have built this incredibly amazing “diamond mirror,” which not only fulfills the above-mentioned requirement but can also be deployed in many other industries. A postgraduate student at Harvard explains:

“The selling point with this research is that we had a 10-kilowatt laser-focused down into a 750-micron spot on a 3-by-3-millimeter diamond, which is a lot of energy focused down on a very small spot, and we didn’t burn it. This is important because as laser systems become more and more power-hungry, you need to come up with creative ways to make the optical components more robust.”

Manufacturing of semiconductor materials and deep-space communications are the prominent areas where this diamond mirror can be utilized with a success rate of 100%. Moreover, there is no panic about its lifespan as well, because it is constructed in such a way that this issue is not worth discussing. To that end, this is the most irresistible as well as the most imperishable material ever built.

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