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Edible Lasers

Writer's picture: Mishkat BhattacharyaMishkat Bhattacharya

Lasers make for a $20 billion dollar industry and have all kinds of applications: industrial, medical, surveying, communication (internet), pointers...In this post I will cover some recent work on edible lasers.


First a little prehistory: Shortly after the first lasers were invented, Art Schawlow, who later won the Nobel prize in physics, was playing around with jello and made perhaps the earliest edible laser. This stunt was only meant for entertainment and publicity.


But, seriously, why do we need edible lasers? (I should specify these are microlasers, i.e. a few microns in size).


We need edible microlasers because they can be used as sensors. It is often desirable to track edible products for freshness, temperature, pH, sugar concentration, carbon dioxide level, the presence of bacteria, refractive index, etc. Smart packaging edible lasers inside such products makes it easy to track these characteristics without having to open a bottle (juice/jam) or transparent package (think butter or cheese) and take a sample out, for example. Also, no need to worry about consumers taking in nondigestible markers.


Edible lasers can also serve as barcodes. They can encode information like expiry dates and manufacturing information. At present there are concerns about counterfeiting of barcodes for selling low quality food and pharmaceutical products. If the barcode could be placed inside the material rather than as an external label, it would be much harder, if not impossible to counterfeit.

How do edible lasers work? These are made of small particles which can emit light at a particular frequency (which depends on their size) when radiated with light of broad frequency (a little bit like scanning in barcodes with a laser). Barcodes can be encoded into the light emitted by using a number of microlasers of predetermined sizes, which gives a known emission spectrum.


These particles can also be made to change their size in response to changes in pH/temperature of the food they are planted in, for example. This change in size shifts the frequencies they emit. The sensitivity of such methods to their environment is quite good.


What are these lasers made of? They can be made from foods (such as chlorophyll in olive oil) or food additives (such as edible dyes like riboflavin and bixin). Useful parts are also made from spinach leaves, cinnamon oil, chitosan (a material that swells as it pH decreases).


Which foods did the author put their lasers in? Peach compote, pickles, juices, milk, agar. Appetizing?

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