Using air to deflect lasers
Using a novel method, beams of laser light can be deflected using air alone. An invisible grating made only of air is not only immune to damage from the laser light, but it also preserves the original quality of the beam, reports an interdisciplinary.....»»
Innovation strengthens electron-triggered light emissions for quantum-based computational and communications systems
The way electrons interact with photons of light is a vital part of many modern technologies, from lasers to solar panels to LEDs. But the interaction is inherently weak because of a major mismatch in scale: the wavelength of visible light is about 1.....»»
Playing all the angles: A high-contrast grating structure for direction-tunable lasing
Lasers find applications across several fields ranging from telecommunications and remote sensing to medicine. There are many ways in which one can generate laser emission, or lasing, from a device or material. Consequently, there are many types of l.....»»
A birefringence-managed normal-dispersion fiber laser delivering energy-tunable chirp-free solitons
Over the past decades, researchers have demonstrated conventional solitons, stretched pulses, self-similar pulses, and dissipative solitons by managing the dispersion and nonlinearity of fiber lasers. However, new types of robust pulses were less dis.....»»
How Do You Prove There’s Ice on the Moon? With a Lunar Flashlight
A briefcase-sized satellite will ping lasers at the lunar South Pole to locate ice and map it for future human explorers......»»
How to rebuild an atomic clock
Atomic clocks are crucial for everyday living as they help our telecommunications, electrical power grids, GPS systems, transportation, and other processes around the world keep precise time. Some of these clocks use lasers and special resonator cavi.....»»
Small solar flares in large laser bodies
Using 12 high-powered lasers, researchers recreated small solar flares in order to study the mechanisms behind a fundamental astronomical phenomenon known as a magnetic reconnection......»»
A new milestone for laser technology: Seeded free-electron lasers
Extremely intense light pulses generated by free-electron lasers (FELs) are versatile tools in research. Particularly in the X-ray range, they can be deployed to analyze the details of atomic structures of a wide variety of materials and to follow fu.....»»
Using lasers to bond semiconductor electronics components
Today, lasers are well-established in daily life, even if it is sometimes hard to tell what and where they are. As an example, we can find them in CD/DVD readers or medical applications like cancer and eye surgery, being essential tools in a vast ran.....»»
New chip-scale laser isolator opens new research avenues in photonics
Lasers are transformational devices, but one technical challenge prevents them from being even more so. The light they emit can reflect back into the laser itself and destabilize or even disable it. At real-world scales, this challenge is solved by b.....»»
Where should we impact an asteroid to effectively deflect its orbit?
Recently, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft crashed into a 170 m asteroid Dimorphos at 6.6 km/s, as the first on-orbit demonstration of deflecting an asteroid by kinetic impact. The DART spacecraft was set to impact the center.....»»
An on-chip time-lens generates ultrafast pulses
Femtosecond pulsed lasers—which emit light in ultrafast bursts lasting a millionth of a billionth of a second—are powerful tools used in a range of applications from medicine and manufacturing, to sensing and precision measurements of space and t.....»»
Why lasers are being used to write inside diamonds
A British company is using unique technology to inscribe diamonds with sophisticated lasers......»»
Fast-as-lightning 3D microprinting with two lasers
Printing objects from plastic precisely, quickly, and inexpensively is the goal of many 3D printing processes. However, speed and high resolution remain a technological challenge. A research team from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Heid.....»»
A solar gravitational lens will be humanity"s most powerful telescope. What are its best targets?
One of the central predictions of general relativity is that a massive object such as a star, galaxy, or black hole can deflect light passing nearby. This means that light from distant objects can be gravitationally lensed by objects closer to us. Un.....»»
The Physics of Smashing a Spacecraft Into an Asteroid
NASA will soon release the results of its DART mission to find out whether crashing a probe into a space rock can deflect it. Here’s how they'll do the math......»»
Researchers propose and demonstrate an optical black hole cavity based on transformation optics
Whispering-gallery-mode (WGM) cavities represent an intriguing platform for intensely enhancing light-matter interaction. It lays the foundations for ultra-low threshold lasers, ultra-sensitive sensing, nonlinear optics and quantum photonics. The con.....»»
Qubits surf sound waves between quantum nodes
Sound waves in a piezoelectric material can steer electrons to precise destinations. Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images) Inspired by the functioning of pulsed lasers, scientists from France and Japan have developed.....»»
Researchers use multiple lasers to create reproducible coherent light structures at wavelength level
Scientists from Japan have employed theoretical calculations to model the optical radiation force distribution induced by an arbitral light pattern including an interference pattern. Based on the simulations, they were able to fabricate nano-sized st.....»»
High efficiency and low noise amplification of ultrashort pulses by quasi-parametric amplification
Since the earliest demonstration of chirped-pulse amplification (CPA) and optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification (OPCPA), femtosecond lasers have been able to deliver ultrahigh peak powers up to ten-petawatt (PW), thereby paving the way for c.....»»
Harpoons, robots and lasers: How to capture defunct satellites and other space junk and bring it back to Earth
More than half of the thousands of satellites in orbit are now defunct, and this accumulation of floating space debris has been described as a "fatal problem" for current and future space missions and human space travel......»»