Assume you could make two perfectly flat mirrors also perfectly parallel to one another inside of a vacuum chamber. If you introduced a laser beam into the system and one way or another fed the light to those parallel mirrors so that the beam simply reflected back and forth going between the surface of the two mirrors, what would happen? Would that beam continue to be reflected back and forth ad infinitum? Could you also build a mechanism that would turn one of the mirrors to "release" the energy by changing the beam's direction and aiming it at a target? (for this discussion, let's assume the mechanism can move the mirror instantaneously)
Since the light would be polarized and only travel between the two mirrors there should not be any observable radiation to anyone looking at the system until the release. This setup would require a vacuum so no foreign particles could diffuse the light and also perfect mirrors so that the reflective surfaces would not scatter the light either. I've googled a bit about how much photonic energy is absorbed by a mirror, and it seems that if the mirror is of substantial mass and has high enough reflectivity then the beam's energy loss would be minimal.
Please excuse my terrible drawings, obviously I didn't take the time to measure the correct angles or anything like that so it's very crude: http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/6884/lightshow.jpg
Could you also synchronize the laser input so that you can add constructive energy to this system? That is, can you continue to add laser light to the beam already reflecting back and forth in order to increase its power, or would that be nearly impossible and doing so would only add interference? If that is possible, and there was no release mechanism as I described above, would the beam eventually become powerful enough to burn through the mirror itself or would something else break the system before that happened?
I'm thinking about uses for a wide variety of things like power storage, weapons, optical computing, basically anything that would also apply to the research being done on slowing light down to a near standstill (eg- http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gaz...1.24/01-stoplight.html ).
I can also envision something of a light ball of sorts, where a hollow shell is coated with a perfectly reflective surface on the inside with only one small hole where a laser beam is allowed to enter the interior. What kind of forces and energies could be observed inside of the shell? I would imagine that concept to be similar to the way that jewelers use refractive properties to make cuts in gems so that they "hold" the light inside the stone. If this is theoretically possible, could you seal off that shell and then open it back up some time later and release the light that has been trapped inside?
This was just food for thought; I was recently reading about the NIF and it got me curious about how all those hugely complicated laser amplification systems actually work.
Since the light would be polarized and only travel between the two mirrors there should not be any observable radiation to anyone looking at the system until the release. This setup would require a vacuum so no foreign particles could diffuse the light and also perfect mirrors so that the reflective surfaces would not scatter the light either. I've googled a bit about how much photonic energy is absorbed by a mirror, and it seems that if the mirror is of substantial mass and has high enough reflectivity then the beam's energy loss would be minimal.
Please excuse my terrible drawings, obviously I didn't take the time to measure the correct angles or anything like that so it's very crude: http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/6884/lightshow.jpg
Could you also synchronize the laser input so that you can add constructive energy to this system? That is, can you continue to add laser light to the beam already reflecting back and forth in order to increase its power, or would that be nearly impossible and doing so would only add interference? If that is possible, and there was no release mechanism as I described above, would the beam eventually become powerful enough to burn through the mirror itself or would something else break the system before that happened?
I'm thinking about uses for a wide variety of things like power storage, weapons, optical computing, basically anything that would also apply to the research being done on slowing light down to a near standstill (eg- http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gaz...1.24/01-stoplight.html ).
I can also envision something of a light ball of sorts, where a hollow shell is coated with a perfectly reflective surface on the inside with only one small hole where a laser beam is allowed to enter the interior. What kind of forces and energies could be observed inside of the shell? I would imagine that concept to be similar to the way that jewelers use refractive properties to make cuts in gems so that they "hold" the light inside the stone. If this is theoretically possible, could you seal off that shell and then open it back up some time later and release the light that has been trapped inside?
This was just food for thought; I was recently reading about the NIF and it got me curious about how all those hugely complicated laser amplification systems actually work.