r/UBreddit • u/klaguerre • 14h ago

Nanoparticle Lasers

Hi All, I'm trying to connect with any students who know if the school has nanoparticle lasers like these in this article about the University of Rochester. I presently am working with other Niagara Falls/Buffalo residents to get the water cleaned and our landfills remediated. I've been studying possible methods for some time and have been trying to find a way to get the NYS Dept of Conservation to get some of these and start cleaning the landfills. Anyone know if UB makes these as well? Also, is anyone working on landfill remediation and the mechanics of it, how to create improvements? There's a lot of growth in this sector in China, some has been studied at the University of Rochester but I am unaware if UB has been making similar progress.

https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/pfas-chemicals-in-water-electrocatalysis-method-596532/

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u/LikerofPortals_ 13h ago

Answering your question, I would look into the photonics institute here at the university. I personally don't know any of the faculty there, but from what I'm reading it seems like they deal a lot in the type of work you're interested in. However, I would maybe temper expectations for any practical use any time soon. From what I'm seeing, the researchers in the article you linked are working on a rather small scale. Researchers in many fields can have a tendency to talk up their work and over-promise in order to get attention and funding; and on the whole academic research can be extremely slow moving. This isn't to say that the technology isn't really promising, just that the road to viability at scale might be a lot longer than it initially seems. I remember about 10 years ago when graphene was the big technology that was gonna transform everything; and a lot of those potential uses still haven't really left the university labs.