A single drop of blood is teeming with microorganisms—imagine if we could see them, and even nanometer-sized viruses, with the naked eye. That's a real possibility with what scientists call a "perfect lens." The lens hasn't ...
Optics & Photonics
Jul 17, 2015
2
870
Scientists from Regensburg and Zurich have found a fascinating way to push an atom with controlled forces so quickly that they can choreograph the motion of a single molecule within less than a trillionth of a second. The ...
Quantum Physics
Sep 2, 2020
5
1707
The human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, wages war in our bodies using a strategy evolved over millions of years that turns our own cellular machines against themselves. Despite massive strides in understanding the disease, ...
Optics & Photonics
Dec 19, 2019
0
353
University of Illinois physicists have experimentally demonstrated for the first time how three-dimensional conduction is affected by the defects that plague materials. Understanding these effects is important for many electronics ...
General Physics
Oct 7, 2011
6
0
In dim light a cat sees much better than you do, as do dogs and nocturnal animals. That's because the structure of a cat's eye has a tapetum lucidum, a mirror-like layer immediately behind the retina. Light entering the eye ...
When the American physicist Arthur Compton discovered that light waves behave like particles in 1922, and could knock electrons out of atoms during an impact experiment, it was a milestone for quantum mechanics. Five years ...
Quantum Physics
Apr 15, 2020
1
1722
Whether Harry Potter's invisibility cloak, which perfectly steers light waves around objects to make them invisible, will ever become reality remains to be seen, but perfecting a more crucial cloak is impossible, a new study ...
General Physics
Jun 7, 2019
2
111
Light has some well-established dynamical properties that have defined our understanding of electromagnetic radiation for over a century. Two of the most fundamental of these properties are that photons of light carry momentum ...
Optics & Photonics
Apr 25, 2014
7
4
The theory of relativity works well when you want to explain cosmic-scale phenomena—such as the gravitational waves created when black holes collide. Quantum theory works well when describing particle-scale phenomena—such ...
Quantum Physics
May 17, 2023
8
1077
Light is an electromagnetic wave: It consists of oscillating electric and magnetic fields propagating through space. Every wave is characterized by its frequency, which refers to the number of oscillations per second, measured ...
Optics & Photonics
Dec 2, 2021
4
3653
