IEEE Spectrum July, 2009 - 2

back story
editorial
EdITor IN chIEF

s children, we fantasize
about lasers that could
blast a spaceship into
smithereens. As adults, drinking
gin and tonic outdoors on a
summer evening, we'd settle
for a much smaller laser to
vaporize mosquitoes.
Jeff Hecht [above] is just the
man to tell you how either one
would work. He was putting the
finishing touches on this month's
"Ray Guns Get Real," about the
U.S. military's program to create
a massive solid-state laser, when
some interesting news came out
of Washington state: Researchers
there had successfully tested a
"mosquito flashlight," designed
to kill the insects before they
can snack on you. A team of
astrophysicists formerly with
Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory, including Lowell
citing articles in ieee spectrum

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Top: Lois HecHT; BoTTom: James D. GaTHany/cDc

Lasers, Great
and Small

Wood, a protégé of Edward
Teller's, had managed to build
a laser accurate enough to fry
mosquitoes in midflight.
Hecht was delighted. The
veteran technology correspondent
has been writing about lasers,
optoelectronics, and solid-state
physics since 1974 for such
publications as Laser Focus World,
New Scientist, and the Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists. In fact,
he had come up with this same
mosquito-killing scheme himself
and submitted the idea in the
form of a short science-fiction
story to the journal Nature. The
story, called "Directed Energy:
More Than a Flash in the Pan,"
was published in 2006-a full
year before Wood suggested his
mosquito zapper.
The idea is destined to become
more than a sci-fi figment. Bill
Gates recently announced he
would put the considerable weight
of his charitable foundation
behind the project, with the goal
of eradicating malaria.
"Is it really possible that I came
up with such a wild and crazy idea
before Lowell Wood-the master
of wild and crazy ideas?" Hecht
asks. The Pentagon's
research effort into
laser "death rays"
is celebrating
its 50th birthday
this year, but
without delivering anything
capable of torching a tank or
melting a missile. So perhaps it's
fitting that the first casualties
of the laser death ray should be
mosquitoes. "The way the funding
for the military lasers is going,"
Hecht says, "I think the mosquito
death ray just might make it into
production first."
o

Susan hassler, s.hassler@ieee.org

ExEcUTIVE EdITor

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum July, 2009