Honest question: what is the difference between a "white laser" and a three-color polychromatic laser array?
One third as many lasers. Not trying to be snarky, although it certainly looks that way. Simply put, a "pixel" of RGB takes up nearly three times as much room as a "pixel" of white... even if that white is tunable across the gamut. If you aren't making it tunable you've also got one third the electronics. And since we use "white" a lot more than we use RGB, being able to economically produce white in a single process is much more economical than assembling white through three chromatic devices... even if technically, they're the same.
So it's a density matter. Got it. Because from what I got from the article, it sounded like it was pretty much a single-element three color polychromatic laser. Though that's fair enough - it is true that even if my above statement is true, it is still one third of the controllers at least and that does makes things cheaper. Thanks!
It's pretty much a single-element three color polychromatic laser. HOWEVER their innovation was a manufacturing process that allows it all to be grown on one die, allowing a semiconductor fabrication process. After exhaustive research, the group finally came up with a strategy to create the required shape first, and then convert the materials into the right alloy contents to emit the blue color. Turkdogan said, "To the best of our knowledge, our unique growth strategy is the first demonstration of an interesting growth process called dual ion exchange process that enabled the needed structure."
This strategy of decoupling structural shapes and composition represents a major change of strategy and an important breakthrough that finally made it possible to grow a single piece of structure containing three segments of different semiconductors emitting all needed colors and the white lasers possible. Turkdogan said that, "this is not the case, typically, in the material growth where shapes and compositions are achieved simultaneously."
Amazing. Thanks for the further detail. This seriously sounds like it's going to do us a lot of good in many applications.