• Question: Other than healthcare and space, how and why would use a laser?

    Asked by SQUIRES to Viviene DC, Jemma K on 19 May 2025.
    • Photo: Viviene Dela Cruz

      Viviene Dela Cruz answered on 19 May 2025:

      This is a great question! Lasers are used for a loooot of things, including barcode scanning when you check out your groceries at the till. So lasers are good for communicating messages (like barcodes) to a computer. Lasers are also good for testing the strength of materials, which would fall into the materials science industry. Another would be quantum computing– lasers are used for a bunch of different parts of quantum computing, including controlling (“manipulating”) qubits, trapping ions that carry the 0s or 1s, or cooling down atoms. Another industry that uses lasers is the high-energy industry, where lasers are used to search for potential clean energy sources and distribution. So yeah– communications, material science (material strength), quantum computing, energy industry, security, nuclear fusion research, are some of the other industries where lasers are used 🙂

Comments

  • Photo: Thomas

    Thomas commented on :

    Do you have a games console or a music player with a disk drive?
    We don’t really advertise it but they all use tiny lasers to read the disc – the get information off a CD and into a computer, or use a laser to copy the information. out of the computer and stick it on the disk. Disk’s. can hold tonnes of information and they are fairly stable way of carrying around large files conveniently without risking putting them on the internet. – as long as they don’t get scratched.