Using noise to enhance optical sensing

In conventional sensing methods, noise is always a problem, especially in systems that are meant to detect changes in their environment that are hardly bigger or even smaller than the noise in the system. Encountering this ...

Quantum light sources pave the way for optical circuits

An international team headed up by Alexander Holleitner and Jonathan Finley, physicists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), has succeeded in placing light sources in atomically thin material layers with an accuracy ...

Scientists develop printable water sensor

A new, versatile plastic-composite sensor can detect tiny amounts of water. The 3-D printable material, developed by a Spanish-Israeli team of scientists, is cheap, flexible and non-toxic and changes its colour from purple ...

Putting photons in jail

A miniature prison for photons—that is the nanocavity discovered by scientists of the University of Twente. It is an extremely small cavity surrounded by an optical crystal, a structure of pores etched in two perpendicular ...

Machine learning helps improving photonic applications

Photonic nanostructures can be used for many applications besides solar cells—for example, optical sensors for cancer markers or other biomolecules. A team at HZB using computer simulations and machine learning has now ...

Physicists devise method to reveal how light affects materials

Physicists developed a way to determine the electronic properties of thin gold films after they interact with light. Nature Communications published the new method, which adds to the understanding of the fundamental laws ...

Researchers track Chinese space station as it falls

A defunct Chinese space station, Tiangong-1, is expected to fall to Earth any day now—on March 31, give or take a few days. When it does, it will be the largest manmade object to re-enter Earth's atmosphere in a decade.

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