On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 12:12 AM, James Propp <jpropp@cs.uml.edu> wrote:
While we're talking about optics, I was musing the other day about whether there's a way to make a windshield (or a pair of sunglasses) that will transmit less of the light emitted by really bright sources without transmitting less of the light emitted by dimmer sources.
This is nonlinear optics, so you probably won't get it in a pair of sunglasses any time soon. The implementations I've seen use rubidium gas; the transparency of the cell depends critically on how many photons the gas has absorbed. This is useful for certain quantum algorithms where you have a photon in a superposition of paths, one leading into the chamber and one not; then a second photon fired at the chamber will be absorbed or reflect depending on the first, which entangles the two. -- Mike Stay - metaweta@gmail.com http://math.ucr.edu/~mike http://reperiendi.wordpress.com