Searching For A Blue-Light Special Gu Prof, Research Team Trying To Find Economical Laser

David Cleary has an ideal name for a scientist who’s seeking to create the nearly impossible - colorless crystals that can turn red laser beams blue.

In a laboratory of powerful microscopes and blistering furnaces at Gonzaga University, Cleary and his co-workers are spending their summer vacation attempting to create a resilient crystal that, when a red-light laser passes through it, changes to blue light.

It’s a discovery that Johnson Matthey Electronics in the Valley has estimated would be worth $2 billion to industry.

That’s because inexpensive blue-light lasers would allow compact disc players in computers and stereos to read and store at least four times the information and music permitted by current infrared lasers.

“That’s where the business is,” says Cleary, the 1998 winner of Gonzaga’s Great Teachers Award for Distinguished Scholarship. “That’s what everybody wants.”

Since Cleary left Washington State University in 1993, the 37-year-old chemistry teacher - and co-workers George LeBret, a Central Valley High School teacher, and Scott Jacobson, of Lake City High School in Coeur d’Alene - have received more than $600,000 in grants from the National Science Foundation, the Research Corp. and Johnson Matthey.

They use the money to buy high-priced equipment, employ student assistants and conduct experiments on crystals.

It may be a new age, however, before Cleary finds his crystals. By then, someone else already may have found them.

Because of the potential financial rewards, researchers around the world are spending millions searching for an efficient, economical blue-light laser system.

Cleary’s research team - composed of three undergraduate students and two high school teachers - is little match for the laboratories at Xerox, Hewlett-Packard, Johnson Matthey and major universities.

“I’m not the leader in this field,” Cleary says. “They’re not waiting to see what Dave Cleary comes up with.”

Cleary and his co-workers have only 10 weeks of summer break to conduct experiments. During the rest of the year, they teach or attend classes.

The team also experiments on ways to use crystals to instantly detect chemical leaks and to triple the length of a lithium battery charge.

That work has brought attention from Japanese researchers, who have visited Cleary’s laboratory.

“We’re chemists and we like to make things,” Cleary says. “But once we finally have a crystal that looks like it will work, we’re finished. We hand it off to the engineers” to use in a product.

Contrary to what some believe, crystals do not emit any special powers or rays, Cleary says. But producing them under the intense pressure and heat of a tabletop furnace can create a powerful reaction.

“Explosions are a problem,” Cleary says. “We’ve cleared off the bench top a few times.”

Blue-light lasers have the potential to accelerate the information age. The shorter wavelength of blue light allows a laser beam to focus on a space half the size of the focal point of a red-light laser, meaning twice as much information can be stored on a compact disc. But thus far, Cleary says, blue-light lasers have burnt out quickly and cost $5,000 or more to produce. That’s far too costly to use in a consumer product.

Johnson Matthey and others have worked to create new, tri-compound crystals that could efficiently generate a blue-light laser at a low cost.

Cleary’s theory is simpler - produce a colorless crystal that converts an existing red laser beam to blue with little loss of energy.

Cleary is experimenting with sulfides, or sulfur-based compounds. He creates sparkling crystals by heating the sulfides to 600 degrees Celsius for up to a month.

These crystals show promise, Cleary says, but have one flaw - they are orange. The color fouls up the laser because it absorbs the light that’s needed to convert the red light to blue. So Cleary keeps experimenting, substituting different compounds in search of the colorless crystal. Cleary says his students usually come up with their best discoveries near the end of the summer. At that time, he asks them to carefully compile their research notes so another team can dust them off the following year and try again.

“I don’t care if these students ever become chemists,” Cleary says. “This is an educational activity.”