A team of researchers working at the National Ignition Facility, part of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has found that covering a cylinder containing a small amount of hydrogen fuel with a magnetic coil and firing ...
JILA and NIST Fellow James K. Thompson's team of researchers have for the first time successfully combined two of the "spookiest" features of quantum mechanics to make a better quantum sensor: entanglement between atoms ...
Optics & Photonics
Oct 21, 2022
8
2143
Lasers produce coherent waves of light: All the light inside a laser vibrates completely in sync. Meanwhile, quantum mechanics tells us that particles like atoms should also be thought of as waves. As a result, we can build ...
Condensed Matter
Jun 14, 2022
7
5455
Capturing blur-free images of fast movements like falling water droplets or molecular interactions requires expensive ultrafast cameras that acquire millions of images per second. In a new paper, researchers report a camera ...
Optics & Photonics
Sep 14, 2023
0
214
Whether in photosynthesis or in a photovoltaic system: if you want to use light efficiently, you have to absorb it as completely as possible. However, this is difficult if the absorption is to take place in a thin layer of ...
Optics & Photonics
Aug 25, 2022
8
1743
They may be tiny weapons, but Brigham Young University's holography research group has figured out how to create lightsabers—green for Yoda and red for Darth Vader, naturally—with actual luminous beams rising from them.
Optics & Photonics
May 7, 2021
8
2290
How fast can electronics be? When computer chips work with ever shorter signals and time intervals, at some point they come up against physical limits. The quantum-mechanical processes that enable the generation of electric ...
Quantum Physics
Mar 25, 2022
1
987
Quick bursts of laser light, lasting less than a trillionth of a second, are used in a range of applications today. These ultrashort laser pulses have allowed scientists to observe chemical reactions in real-time, image delicate ...
Optics & Photonics
Nov 11, 2021
0
289
A team of physicists from the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms and other universities has developed a special type of quantum computer known as a programmable quantum simulator capable of operating with 256 quantum ...
Optics & Photonics
Jul 8, 2021
3
5584
After decades of inertial confinement fusion research, a record yield of more than 1.3 megajoules (MJ) from fusion reactions was achieved in the laboratory for the first time during an experiment at Lawrence Livermore National ...
Plasma Physics
Nov 8, 2021
26
3804
