A 73-Year-Old Chemical Reaction Just Produced Something Never Seen Before: a Frequency Comb
In 2005, the Nobel Prize in Physics went to a technology that measures light with a precision so extreme it can count individual cycles of a laser beam. The optical frequency comb, a spectrum of evenly spaced, perfectly synchronized lines, became the ruler that redefined how we measure time, distance, and the composition of distant stars. Since then, the same pattern has turned up in vibrating crystals, magnetic materials, ferroelectric devices, and even cosmological models of the early universe.
One place it had never appeared, until now: a bubbling dish of chemicals changing color.