The anti-laser—a tech with such a cool name it doesn’t need an obvious application—first came to our attention last year when Yale’s A. Douglas Stone proposed the idea. Now Stone is back with the real thing. His new paper in Science documents the world’s first anti-laser.

Conventional lasers create intense beams of light by stimulating atoms to spit out a coherent beam of light in which all the light waves march in lockstep. The crests of one wave match the crests of all the others, and troughs match up with troughs. The anti-laser does the reverse: Two perfect beams of laser light go in, and are completely absorbed. [Wired]

Anti-lasers are a bit of a funny concept, because anybody who has worn black on an August afternoon knows that absorbing light and turning it into heat isn’t a problem. But creating a device that matches the concentrated beam of a laser and traps more than 99 percent of it—essentially reversing a laser—is an engineering feat.

Whereas a laser uses mirrors to bounce light back and forth through an ...