Now we have world's first anti-laser

A team of Physicist at Yale University, have built the world's first device that can cancel out a laser beam - a so-called anti-laser which is capable of absorbing an incoming laser beam entirely. Their device focuses two lasers beams of a specific frequency into a specially designed optical cavity made from silicon, which traps the incoming beams of light and forces them to bounce around until all their energy is dissipated.

In a paper published in the journal Science they demonstrated that the anti-laser could adsorb 99.4 per cent of incoming light, for a specific wavelength.

Altering the wavelength of the incoming light means that the anti-laser can effectively be turned on and off - and that could be used in optical switches.

The anti-laser's big advantage is that it is built using silicon, which is already widely used in computing.