Geometry of intricately fabricated glass makes light trap itself

Laser light traveling through ornately microfabricated glass has been shown to interact with itself to form self-sustaining wave patterns called solitons. The intricate design fabricated in the glass is a type of "photonic ...

Probing semiconductor crystals with a sphere of light

Tohoku University researchers have developed a technique using a hollow sphere to measure the electronic and optical properties of large semiconducting crystals. The approach, published in the journal Applied Physics Express, ...

Researchers develop new variant of Maxwell's demon at nanoscale

Maxwell's demon is a machine proposed by James Clerk Maxwell in 1867. The hypothetical machine would use thermal fluctuations to obtain energy, apparently violating the second principle of thermodynamics. Now, researchers ...

Video: The making of the largest 3-D map of the universe

DESI, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, will mobilize 5,000 swiveling robots – each one pointing a thin strand of fiber-optic cable – to gather the light from about 35 million galaxies.

Quantum optical cooling of nanoparticles

When a particle is completely isolated from its environment, the laws of quantum physics start to play a crucial role. One important requirement to see quantum effects is to remove all thermal energy from the particle motion, ...

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