from Nature
Turn internal combustion into, like, lasers, dude. Pollution into light.
quote:The hot gases belching out of your car's exhaust are not just useless waste. They are a laser waiting to happen, says physicist Marlan Scully1.
All you need to harness this potential, suggests Scully, of Texas A&M University in College Station, is a quantum afterburner. This hypothetical modification would use quantum mechanics to boost the engine's efficiency by clawing back waste heat and turning it into useful energy - laser light.
Scully's quantum soup-up would involve adding two new parts to an exhaust pipe: a laser and a maser (a kind of laser that emits microwaves rather than visible light). Both would produce radiation as soon as the number of high-energy molecules in the hot gas became abnormally large.
Normally, the higher the energy of excited molecules, the fewer of them there are. But in lasers, there is a population inversion - the gas becomes rich in excited molecules. Excited molecules then lose their energy by emitting it as light.
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