Lasers

PLACEHOLDER, PLEASE WRITE AN INTRODUCTION TO LASERS HERE

When the laser was invented in 1960, it was initially described as "a solution without a problem"(citation?), as it wasn't immediately obvious what it would be useful for. In retrospect we know that this is one of the most valuable inventions in the last 100 years as lasers are used for a wide variety of things; surgery, measurements, information reading and processing, industrial purposes and weapons. They also have a central role in a lot of popular culture and is loved by nerds all over the world.

Enter the bio-laser

In 2011, a paper was published in Nature Photonics[*] on using a single mammalian cell as the gain medium for a bio-laser, describing the coherence and amplification seen in non-biological lasers. There have been several other cases of work on bio-lasers afterwards, including the very successful 2016 TU Delft iGEM project. All of these projects have mentioned the potential of using the amplification effect of a bio-laser to improve sensitivity of existing measurement methods, as the amplification effect of a laser could make for very sensitive changes in the concentration of fluorescent material. This is a potential we wanted to investigate. One of the great limitations of science is the sensitivity of the methods of measurement, and being able to improve this would surely be a boon to cell biology in the future.

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