IMAGINE what you could do with a paint that thinks it’s a laser. You could
brighten up your neighbourhood by decorating walls or street signs, or create a
new form of illumination for bridges or other landmarks.
The idea may sound far-fetched but it could just become a reality. In 1999,
two groups of scientists who were developing new dyes noticed bizarre peaks in
the light emission spectra of their mixtures. Unlike fluorescent dyes or
light-emitting polymers, the new dyes seemed to be amplifying particular
wavelengths of light into coherent laser beams. But no one knew at the time how…
