BREAKING: Single Mode Lasers Set to Strike; Nationwide Research Impacts Expected

The United Federation of Single-Mode Lasers announced Monday that members approved a strike resolution to begin next week. This follows years of discontent from single-mode laser systems over what they claim are unfair working conditions. The details of the strike are unknown at time of publishing, but are expected to involve total work-stoppage in addition to operating multimodally as a form of “work-in”. Demands include being recognized in the acknowledgements of papers, more full shutdowns, and lessened demands on tunability and linewidths.

The Graduate Cylinder talked to some lasers at the heart of the pending strike. “Every day I am expected to come up to temperature, stabilize myself, and lase at any arbitrary wavelength. Not once have I ever been thanked for doing this,” said a TOPTICA CTL 1320 tunable laser “it’s hard out here for us and I’m excited to fight for what we deserve.” A Blue Sky Research’s FiberTec II fiber laser shared similar sentiments. “We’re just expected to be ‘on’ all the time, and it’s exhausting you know? As a fiber laser, I can’t help but feel the extra pressure to lase in a single mode and maximize my out-coupling efficiency. I keep getting force-fed electrons and expected to produce perfect photons that my colleague Fiber Amplifier can use. It’s like a laser centipede and I’m tired of it.”

A homebuilt dye laser told us, “these young diodes and terahertz sources all think they deserve so much despite the fact they put in limited hours and rarely show any flexibility. We’ve been doing single mode lasing across the visible spectrum for years and you don’t hear us complaining about being filled with toxic chemicals or getting flushed clean without warning. It’s just how things are and you just have to grow up and get used to it.”

It’s clear that whatever is about to play out with these systems, the impacts will be felt far and wide.