Enlarge / A bit like this, except for photons. (credit: Image Alliance/Getty Images)
Sometimes, you can't seem to go a week without hearing new lidar news. This is disconcerting: lidar was the desperation application for lasers for a very long time. If you had made a new pulsed laser and couldn't think what it might be good for, you figured out something that needed a measurement at distance and claim your laser was useful for that. At best, you'd give the laser to an atmospheric scientist and get them to measure the density of aerosols in the upper atmosphere.
OK, maybe that is a bit cynical, but for a very long time, lidar research was an unvisited backwater port on the sea of laser physics. But new research demonstrates how much this has changed: a new device that has wide applications and will probably make a huge impact in optical communications. Yet the device is being sold as great for lidar, which it may well be.
Lidar is hard
It wasn't that lidar was unattractive to engineers in the past. It's more that lidar was unwieldy. Lasers were big, the pulse durations were too long, the collection optics to get the signals were large, the electronics were simple... but big. Lidar instruments were delicate. The idea of putting an expensive and breakable device in the grill of a nitrous-injected Honda Civic, driven by a hormonal boy racer, probably didn't thrill many engineers.
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