Yes, but if a chicken and a half laid an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long would it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all the seeds off a dill pickle?
get enough gain that you can don’t need the mirrors —- it’s pretty easy to build one about a foot long that can make nanosecond pulses that are about as long as the laser.
Random lasers uses random particles to extend the optical path instead of mirrors
"Near-Field Optical Nanopatterning of Graphene" (2025) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/smsc.202500184 .. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45623301
Why are they random lasers?
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45949800 :
> "Cavity electrodynamics of van der Waals heterostructures" (2024) https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.19745 ; graphite / graphene optical cavity
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44922581 :
> "Grover's algorithm to efficiently prepare quantum states in optical cavity QED" (2025) https://phys.org/news/2025-08-grover-algorithm-efficiently-q...:
>> "Deterministic carving of quantum states with Grover's algorithm" (2025) https://journals.aps.org/pra/abstract/10.1103/s3vs-xz7w
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_laser
get enough gain that you can don’t need the mirrors —- it’s pretty easy to build one about a foot long that can make nanosecond pulses that are about as long as the laser.
Random lasers uses random particles to extend the optical path instead of mirrors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_laser
I studied condensed matter physics and knew a professor well who was one of Anderson’s grad students so the phenomenon of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anderson_localization
which is relevant to random lasers is familiar to me.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24950104
That column had all sorts of homemade lasers. CO2, helium-neon, dye lasers...