Our eyes are sensitive to only three spectral color bands (red, green, blue), and people can no longer distinguish colors if it becomes very dark. Spectroscopists can identify many more colors by the frequencies of the light waves and can distinguish atoms and molecules by their spectral fingerprints. In a proof-of-principle experiment, Nathalie Picqué and Theodor Hänsch from the Max-Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) and the Ludwig-Maximilian University (LMU) have now recorded broad spectra with close to 100,000 colors in almost complete darkness. The experiment employs two mode-locked femtosecond lasers and a single photon counting detector. The results have just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Source: Phys.org