Optics & lasers as a research area encompasses the fundamental and applied study of the generation, propagation, manipulation, and detection of light, with a particular emphasis on coherent and monochromatic radiation from lasers. It includes laser physics (gain media, optical cavities, nonlinear and quantum optical effects), beam shaping and guiding (waveguides, fibers, integrated photonics), optical materials and devices (mirrors, modulators, detectors), and advanced techniques such as ultrafast optics, high-power and high-intensity laser systems, laser spectroscopy, and laser-based metrology. This field underpins technologies in precision measurement, optical communication, imaging, microfabrication, and control of matter with light.
In 2023, a team of physicists from Sandia National Laboratories announced a major discovery: a way to steer LED light. If refined, it could mean someday replacing lasers with cheaper, smaller, more energy-efficient LEDs in ...
Optics & Photonics
Jan 20, 2026
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Ultraviolet-B (UV-B) semiconductor lasers are highly sought for medical, biotechnology, and precision manufacturing applications; however, previous UV-B laser diodes were limited to pulsed operation or required cryogenic ...
Optics & Photonics
Jan 17, 2026
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Radio telescopes are instruments that capture faint radio signals from space and convert them into images of celestial bodies. To observe distant black holes clearly, multiple radio telescopes must capture cosmic signals ...
Astronomy
Jan 15, 2026
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Muons are unstable subatomic particles that spontaneously and rapidly transform into other particles via a process known as electroweak decay. Altering the speed with which muons decay into other particles was so far deemed ...
For the first time, physicists in Italy have created a 'lump soliton': an extremely stable packet of light waves which can travel through 3D space, and even interact with other solitons without losing its shape.
In high-intensity laser–matter interactions, including laser-induced particle acceleration, physicists generally want to work with the highest possible focused laser peak power, which is the ratio of energy per unit area ...
Optics & Photonics
Jan 9, 2026
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Physicists from Trinity College Dublin believe new insights into the behavior of light may offer a new means of solving one of science's oldest challenges—how to turn heat into useful energy.
Optics & Photonics
Jan 9, 2026
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Controlling light is an important technological challenge—not just at the large scale of optics in microscopes and telescopes, but also at the nanometer scale. Recently, physicists at the University of Amsterdam published ...
Optics & Photonics
Jan 8, 2026
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Researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) have uncovered previously unobserved oscillation states—so-called Floquet states—in tiny magnetic vortices. Unlike earlier experiments, which required energy-intensive ...
Condensed Matter
Jan 8, 2026
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318
Light can be sculpted into countless shapes. Yet building optical devices that can simultaneously manipulate many different optical patterns at once is extremely complicated, and remains a major challenge in modern photonics.
Optics & Photonics
Jan 8, 2026
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