Researchers have developed an adaptive liquid lens based on a new electrically responsive fluid called dibutyl adipate (DBA) that changes focal length when a voltage is applied. The lens is lightweight, compact and simple ...
Optics & Photonics
Jan 19, 2022
0
149
The last common ancestor of cephalopods and vertebrates existed more than 500 million years ago. In fact, a squid is more closely related to a clam than it is a to a person. Even so, the two lineages independently evolved ...
Plants & Animals
Jan 10, 2022
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120
Researchers have developed a way to create freeform optical components by shaping a volume of curable liquid polymer. The new method is poised to enable faster prototyping of customized optical components for a variety of ...
Optics & Photonics
Nov 18, 2021
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80
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
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289
Inspired by a concept for discovering exoplanets with a massive space telescope, a team of researchers is developing holographic lenses that render visible and infrared starlight into either a focused image or a spectrum. ...
General Physics
Oct 21, 2021
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221
Researchers have created tiny chip-based optical tweezers that can be used to optically levitate nanoparticles in a vacuum. Optical tweezers—which employ a tightly focused laser beam to hold living cells, nanoparticles ...
Optics & Photonics
Oct 21, 2021
1
69
A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Germany and two in France has set a new record for the lowest temperature ever recorded in a lab setting—38 picokelvins. In their paper published in the journal ...
Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have designed one of the most precise stopwatches yet—not for timing Olympic sprinters and swimmers, but for counting single photons, or the tiny packets of energy that ...
Optics & Photonics
Aug 24, 2021
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696
Conventional microscopes provide essential information about samples in two dimensions—the plane of the microscope slide. But flat is not all that. In many instances, information about the object in the third dimension—the ...
Optics & Photonics
Jun 24, 2021
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8
Chemical engineers at the University of Illinois Chicago and UCLA have answered longstanding questions about the underlying processes that determine the life cycle of liquid foams. The breakthrough could help improve the ...
Materials Science
Jun 17, 2021
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