A challenge to creating fusion energy on Earth is trapping the charged gas known as plasma that fuels fusion reactions within a strong magnetic field and keeping the plasma as hot and dense as possible for as long as...
A scientist might want to do cartwheels upon making a discovery, but this time the discovery itself relies on cartwheels.
Researchers at Rice University have discovered details about a novel type of polarized light-matter interaction with light that literally turns end over end as...
When the paradise tree snake flies from one tall branch to another, its body ripples with waves like green cursive on a blank pad of blue sky. That movement, aerial undulation, happens in each glide made by members of...
Traditional lenses—like the ones found in eyeglasses—are bulky, heavy and only focus light across a limited number of wavelengths. A new, ultrathin metalens developed by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, uses an array of tiny, connected waveguides...
Drones and other aircraft effectively spray pesticides over miles of crops, but the method also can pollute the environment if wind carries the mist off-target.
One of the problems is that tiny droplets are hard for aerial crop sprayers, inkjet printers and...
A team of scientists working at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has discovered a new form of the human-made element mendelevium. The newly created isotope, mendelevium-244, is the 17th and lightest form of mendelevium, which is element 101...
To the general public, lasers heat objects. And generally, that would be correct.
But lasers also show promise to do quite the opposite—to cool materials. Lasers that can cool materials could revolutionize fields ranging from bio-imaging to quantum communication.
In 2015,...
Fifty is a critical number for quantum computers capable of solving problems that classic supercomputers cannot solve. Proving quantum supremacy requires at least 50 qubits. For quantum computers working with light, it is equally necessary to have at least...
Just as a meter stick with hundreds of tick marks can be used to measure distances with great precision, a device known as a laser frequency comb, with its hundreds of evenly spaced, sharply defined frequencies, can be used...
A 50-year-old theory that began as speculation about how an alien civilization could use a black hole to generate energy has been experimentally verified for the first time in a Glasgow research lab.
In 1969, British physicist Roger Penrose suggested...
Researchers discovered a new way to engineer optoelectronic devices by stretching a two-dimensional material on top of a silicon photonic platform. Using this method, coined strainoptronics by a team led by George Washington University professor Volker Sorger, the researchers...
