The future of NASA's laser communications

NASA uses lasers to send information to and from Earth, employing invisible beams to traverse the skies, sending terabytes of data—pictures and videos—to increase our knowledge of the universe. This capability is known ...

Scientists twirl liquid light into time-periodic cluster

Researchers from Skoltech, the University of Iceland, and the University of Southampton have demonstrated the formation of an odd never-before-seen entity from the realm of quantum physics: a cluster of optical vortices with ...

Quantum cryptography: Making hacking futile

The Internet is teeming with highly sensitive information. Sophisticated encryption techniques generally ensure that such content cannot be intercepted and read. But in the future high-performance quantum computers could ...

Present and future of nonlinear optical metasurfaces

One of the main objectives of optics is the control of light propagation and confinement. Progress in optics historically started with the development of bulky lenses and mirrors, then prisms and gratings, and so on. The ...

Free-space light coupling using curved micromirrors

Micromirrors are micrometer-scale mirrors that are widely used in many applications, mainly in optical-fiber telecommunications, optical scanners, and optical instrumentation. Micromirrors can be integrated within photonic ...

page 5 from 32