This research paper is a heavy read so don’t bother unless you like this stuff but this is quite a cool development.
I will summarise it here.
The great thing about laser light (LED’s are low level lasers) is that they are very precise and because of this they can be used as a feedback mechanism to measure the concentrations and activity of very small things such as atoms of gas or in fact neurons in the brain.
The problem with lasers though is that they are very narrow beams of light and so any such measuring is hard to get accurate because of the small amount of time that anything wanting to be measured is in the path of the laser light.
Trying to scatter laser light is ineffective because it loses it’s predictable activity and therefore becomes useless.
This researched method uses a very clever two stage converter that maintains the precise parallel nature of the laser while making it 400 times wider.
Such technology could have applications in navigation, communication and medicine using only light instead of radio frequencies with higher speed and more accuracy.
Perhaps even usable in neurology with Infrared lasers for non invasive measuring of brain activity or specific location of damage.