What are the advantages of the new dyes for laser diodes?
The main advantage of these dyes is that they can be used with laser diodes. Early laser diodes typically operated in the red, and as a result you couldn’t use a lot of the other dyes like fluorescein that had been used previously with the traditional lasers, not the diode lasers, and as a result we needed dyes that would allow you to use diode lasers. Another benefit of dyes is that in biological systems there are not a lot of things that autofluoresce in the red part of the spectrum. As a result you get less interference from nonspecific background effects, and in principle you can build better, higher-sensitivity detection systems. Dyes that work with laser diodes also allow you to build detection instruments that are much smaller, compact, and less expensive than if you had to use a big gas laser. With the added benefit of having dyes in the area where there is less background interference from biological material, systems with much higher sensitivity can be built. And then there a
