Photons a la Mode: Studying light pulses by counting photons

(Phys.org) —The photodetectors in Alan Migdall's lab often see no light at all, and that's a good thing since he and his JQI colleagues perform physics experiments that require very little light, the better to study subtle ...

Magnetisation controlled at picosecond intervals

A terahertz laser developed at the Paul Scherrer Institute makes it possible to control a material's magnetisation at a timescale of picoseconds. In their experiment, the researchers shone extremely short light pulses from ...

A new tool to split X-ray laser pulses

(Phys.org) —A new tool at SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source splits individual X-ray laser pulses into two pulses that can hit a target one right after another with precisely controlled timing, allowing scientists to trigger ...

Fast detector for a wide wavelength range

Free-electron lasers are extremely versatile research tools because their intense, super short light flashes permit a closer look at new materials and even biological molecules; thus, allowing effects to be observed that ...

Physicists freeze motion of light for a minute

Physicists in Darmstadt have been able to stop something that has the greatest possible speed and that never really stops. We're talking about light. Already a decade ago, physicists stopped it very for a short moment. In ...

New test bed probes the origin of pulses at LCLS

It all comes down to one tiny spot on a diamond-cut, highly pure copper plate. That's where every X-ray laser pulse at SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source gets its start. That tiny spot must be close to perfect or it can impair ...

Universe's secrets closer thanks to ultrafast lasers

Research from the Institute of Photonics and Quantum Sciences (IPaQS) at Heriot-Watt, has the potential to revolutionise how we observe the universe using telescopes, with a new approach that exploits ultrashort pulses of ...

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