"Since they were invented 50 years ago, lasers have become extraordinarily commonplace. Anyone with a few dollars to spare can get themselves a laser pointer, and every CD, DVD or Blu-ray player uses a laser to read the bits encoded on discs. (It goes without saying that the same is true of those old LaserDisc players.) Just about everyone knows how lasers work, at least on the most superficial level—a concentrated beam of light comes out when energy goes in.
"But what if that same process could be run in reverse, like a movie run backward? Last year, a group of physicists at Yale University proposed a way to do just that with something called a time-reversed laser. Such a device, which some have described with the 007-appropriate "anti-laser," completely swallows light to produce heat or electricity using an optical cavity that absorbs rather than amplifies light."
Scientific American Link: Beam Bagged: "Reverse Laser" Functions as Near-Perfect Light Absorber
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