Method to significantly enhance optical force

Light consists of a flow of photons. If two waveguides – cables for light – are side by side, they attract or repel each other. The interaction is due to the optical force, but the effect is usually extremely small. Physicists ...

New Earth at night images reveal global light pollution problem

NASA's new 'Black Marble' images of the nighttime Earth aren't so black. They reveal that our globe is heavily littered with excessive and wasteful lighting that produces light pollution – a bright glow over our cities ...

Using noise to enhance optical sensing

In conventional sensing methods, noise is always a problem, especially in systems that are meant to detect changes in their environment that are hardly bigger or even smaller than the noise in the system. Encountering this ...

Melanopsin looks on the bright side of life

Better known as the light sensor that sets the body's biological clock, melanopsin also plays an important role in vision: Via its messengers-so-called melanopsin-expressing retinal ganglion cells, or mRGCs-it forwards information ...

New imaging device that is flexible, flat, and transparent

(Phys.org)—Digital cameras, medical scanners, and other imaging technologies have advanced considerably during the past decade. Continuing this pace of innovation, an Austrian research team has developed an entirely new ...

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