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Science: Health: Dental
Laser tooth whitening with extra blue   (+1)  [vote for, against]
Think coatings and Lasik for whiter teeth.

Use cold plasma to put essentially transparent gold, platinum, or Vernon: Iridium film on the tooth surface. Then use direct laser writing (DLW) to make waveguides which are the things that produce the light bending effect. [Wikipedia link Flat Lenses] Wikipedia says flat lenses can be made with films as thin as near 200 nanometers.

Durability unknown but making the microstructured flat lens waveguides from osmium might be tough and unreactive enough. Cold plasma diamond deposition is also published, but there it says “cold” is 600 C.

Then, I think, clever optics like offset prism equivalents cause almost pure blue light to be line of sight to the teeth. Just as optical brighteners add blue to yellowed linens to make them appear whiter, the teeth appear whiter.

It would be nice if it could be advertised as “laser tooth whitening that lasts a decade with one office visit!”
-- beanangel, Dec 28 2017

Wikipedia flat lens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_lens
[beanangel, Dec 28 2017]

Osmium chemically reacts with oxygen in the air, yielding a toxic substance. You should be recommending iridium instead, with more resistance to corrosion than platinum.
-- Vernon, Dec 28 2017


Thanks [Vernon] for your iridium suggestion.

I also wonder if it is possible to laser write waveguides directly on teeth but the nonhomogenaity and porosity make that seem unlikely.
-- beanangel, Dec 28 2017


Instructions unclear, my teeth are now green.
-- Voice, Dec 28 2017


I tried this with Lasix and now my race horse has whiter teeth.
-- normzone, Dec 29 2017



random, halfbakery