When laser flashes hit matter, electrons are knocked off their orbits around the atomic nuclei. This can generate extremely hot plasmas composed of charged particles—ions and electrons. Researchers at HZDR have now observed ...
Optics & Photonics
Apr 14, 2026
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1701
A research group from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology reports in Nature an unprecedented achievement in electron microscopy: the direct measurement of "dark points" within light waves. By doing so, the researchers ...
Optics & Photonics
Mar 26, 2026
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488
For the first time, an international team of physicists has successfully harnessed a rare orbital transition in atoms of ytterbium to create a new type of atomic clock that is both highly precise and extremely sensitive to ...
Researchers at the Würzburg site of the Cluster of Excellence ctd.qmat have succeeded in transferring the topological quantum Hall and spin Hall effects to a hybrid light-matter system by harnessing targeted material design. ...
Optics & Photonics
Mar 27, 2026
0
184
The nature of quantum particles has long puzzled scientists. While single-particle interference suggests that a photon can behave like a spread-out wave, a whole photon is only ever detected in one specific place. Traditional ...
Optics & Photonics
Mar 26, 2026
0
182
Many current wireless communication, imaging and sensing technologies rely on components that convert oscillating electric and magnetic fields (i.e., electromagnetic waves) into electrical signals. Some of the most used components ...
Over the past decades, quantum scientists have introduced various technologies that operate leveraging quantum mechanical effects, including quantum sensors, computers and memory devices. Most of these technologies leverage ...
Can light behave like a whirlwind? It turns out it can—and such "optical tornadoes" have now been created in an extremely small structure by scientists from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, the Military ...
Optics & Photonics
Mar 27, 2026
0
133
Acoustic metamaterials are a fast-evolving family of materials which manipulate sound waves in ever more advanced ways. Now, a team led by Changqing Xu at Nanjing Normal University in China has engineered an acoustic metamaterial, ...
Detecting a single particle of light is hard; detecting a single microwave photon is even harder. Microwave photons, the tiny packets of electromagnetic radiation used in current technologies like Wi-Fi and radar, carry far ...
Optics & Photonics
Apr 3, 2026
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