Optics

World-largest Petawatt Laser Completed, Delivering 2,000 Trillion Watts Output

The Institute of Laser Engineering (ILE), Osaka University, has succeeded to reinforce the Petawatt [3] laser "LFEX" to deliver up to 2,000 trillion watts in the duration of one trillionth of one second (this corresponds to 1000 times the integr ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 10 2015 - 7:32am

'Magic' Sphere For Computing Using Photons

In several years- in perhaps decades, or maybe never- our computers, nanoantennas and other kinds of equipment could operate on the base of photons, rather than electrons. Even now we are practically prepared to accomplish this switch. If it happens, the ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 30 2015 - 1:30pm

Laser Razors- What Technology Can And Can't Do

Since their first use in the 1960s, there has been a tremendous expansion of laser technology into an impressively wide range of uses, from fundamental science, health care and security to entertainment. Since Theodore Maiman’s first working laser at the ...

Article - The Conversation - Oct 17 2015 - 8:23am

Light: Plucking A Particle Out Of A Pulse

Researchers have managed to 'pluck' a single photon, one particle of light, out of a pulse of light.  ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 3 2015 - 8:30am

The Secret Life In Soil Revealed

Most of us think nothing of rainfall or where it goes, unless it leads to flooding or landslides. But soil scientists have been studying how water moves across or through soil for decades. Daniel Hirmas, a professor at University of Kansas, and his team m ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 31 2016 - 8:00am

1,000 Times Faster Than Ever Before

Photosynthesis, vision, and many other biological processes depend on light, but it’s hard to capture responses of biomolecules to light because they happen almost instantaneously. ...

Article - News Staff - May 5 2016 - 1:32pm

Evidence Of Link Between Childhood Cancer And Phototherapy For Jaundice Examined

Two new studies can't prove a link between childhood cancer and light therapy for newborn jaundice but the authors say it still raises enough questions that clinicians should exercise caution in prescribing the treatment for infants whose jaundice is ...

Article - News Staff - May 23 2016 - 1:38pm

QED: First Direct Evidence Of High Energy Light-by-light Scattering, Where Photons Interact And Change Direction

Physicists from the ATLAS experiment at CERN have confirmed one of the oldest predictions of quantum electrodynamics (QED), finding the first direct evidence of high energy light-by-light scattering, a very rare process in which two photons – particles of ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 14 2017 - 5:12pm

Bees Confused By Iridescent Colors- And What That Means For Camouflage

Bumblebee safety alert; don't put holograms in that meadow or near the urban beehive you probably regret buying.  A new study shows that bees, which are already confounded by lots of different things, are mystified by iridescent colors, colors that se ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 31 2018 - 7:15am

Solar Energy Gets A Golden Sandwich

A new photoelectrode can harvest 85 percent of visible light in a 30 nanometers-thin semiconductor layer between gold layers, converting light energy 11 times more efficiently than previous methods, another step on the road to turning solar power from an e ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 10 2018 - 12:07pm