• Question: what are the advantages and disadvantages of using or studying lasers?

    Asked by 10mihalcioiub to Mike, Pip, Tianfu, Tim, Tom on 26 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Tim Stephens

      Tim Stephens answered on 26 Jun 2012:

      Like every area of study, if you’re interested in it then it can be fun and rewarding.
      Lasers are used in so many different types of research that there is a lot of opportunity to study something new and exciting. You can see that just by looking at the different things that the five scientists here do.
      At the same time, one of the things about research is that you have to get used to things not working – if whatever you are studying was known to be easy or possible, then there would be no point in studying it. That’s probably the hardest lesson to learn as a young scientist.

    • Photo: Tom Lister

      Tom Lister answered on 26 Jun 2012:

      Pros:
      I can fire them from the window at people I don’t like in the car park
      Most people in the hospital don’t know how they work so they don’t ever question my job
      they can target the things we want to treat

      Cons:
      You generally have to wear massive goggles to protect your eyes
      It can take ages to build one and get it working properly
      It’s pretty obvious who was firing lasers out of the window at people in the car park

    • Photo: Tianfu Yao

      Tianfu Yao answered on 26 Jun 2012:

      Lasers are becoming more and more popular in research. For fibre lasers, it is very interesting to find some new phenomenons and understand them. Also by comparing with other lasers, fibre lasers need more careful and patient to build. That is because the optical fibre is thin and long. The fibre core size is very small. That is hard to play with. The disadvantage is sometime it is easy to get hurt by some small pieces of fibre. Once you get fibre stick in your skin, it feels very painful.

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