First room-temperature maser developed
British researchers have, for the first time, built a
prototype solid-state maser that works at room temperature, with no permanent
applied magnetic field. Masers, which do the same thing with microwave
radiation that lasers do with visible light, have not become widely used thanks
to their difficult operating conditions – some require cryogenic refrigeration
or vacuum chambers and sometimes strong magnetic fields. The researchers claim
that their device could have a range of applications in the future – from the
detection of explosives to detecting the atomic states of atoms in quantum computing.