Imagine dropping a tennis ball onto a bedroom mattress. The tennis ball will bend the mattress a bit, but not permanently—pick the ball back up, and the mattress returns to its original position and strength. Scientists ...
Materials Science
Feb 25, 2022
0
107
Proton therapy is a precise and effective treatment for tumors in sensitive areas of the body, such as the brain or the eyes, with the advantage that it spares healthy tissue. In this procedure, protons (positively charged ...
Optics & Photonics
Feb 1, 2022
0
65
Drilling with the beam of an electron microscope, scientists at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory precisely machined tiny electrically conductive cubes that can interact with light and organized them ...
Optics & Photonics
Jan 28, 2022
1
98
A Lancaster physicist has proposed a radical solution to the question of how a charged particle, such as an electron, responded to its own electromagnetic field.
General Physics
Jan 25, 2022
6
895
Laser beams can do more than just heat things up; they can cool them down too. That is nothing new for physicists who have devoted themselves to precision spectroscopy and the development of optical atomic clocks. But what ...
Quantum Physics
Dec 13, 2021
0
439
The laws of quantum physics are not only extraordinary—they also offer some far-reaching and unique possibilities for advanced information processing, quantum computing and cryptography. So far, the basic building blocks ...
Quantum Physics
Nov 10, 2021
1
1000
Researchers have created tiny chip-based optical tweezers that can be used to optically levitate nanoparticles in a vacuum. Optical tweezers—which employ a tightly focused laser beam to hold living cells, nanoparticles ...
Optics & Photonics
Oct 21, 2021
1
69
Conversion of most materials into organized crystalline structure starts with the nucleation process. One everyday example is the rapid crystalization of supercooled water after the nucleation of a seed crystal. This phenomenon ...
Analytical Chemistry
Jan 28, 2021
0
69
An especially counter-intuitive feature of quantum mechanics is that a single event can exist in a state of superposition—happening both here and there, or both today and tomorrow.
Quantum Physics
Dec 18, 2020
2
773
Particle accelerators generate high-energy beams of electrons, protons and ions for a wide range of applications, including particle colliders that shed light on nature's subatomic components, X-ray lasers that film atoms ...
General Physics
Sep 24, 2020
2
615
