Optics

Magic Magnetic Mirrors Reflect Light In Uncanny Ways

In Lewis Carroll's  Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, the 1871 sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the title character finds a mirror that behaves in a surprising and unexpected way.   Now bizarre mirrors have become ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 17 2014 - 8:00am

New Tractor Beam Can Repel And Attract

A long-distance optical tractor beam can move tiny particles- one fifth of a millimeter in diameter- a distance of up to 20 centimeters, which is almost 100 times further than previous experiments. The hollow laser beam is bright around the edges and dark ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 20 2014 - 4:45pm

Researchers Created A Laser Bullet To See What It Would Look Like- And Here It Is

Laser-powered weapons have been a staple of science-fiction movies for so long we think we know what they would look like, but we really don't. Researchers at the Laser Centre of the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences a ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 22 2014 - 11:51am

Microwave Electron Guns: A Field-Emission Plug-And-Play Solution

On a quest to design an alternative to the complex approaches currently used to produce electrons within microwave electron guns, a team of researchers have demonstrated a plug-and-play solution capable of operating in a high-electric-field environment wi ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 19 2014 - 9:30am

The Walls Can Talk: New Technique Extracts Audio From Video

A new optical technique by which audio information can be extracted from high-speed video recordings, by using an image-matching process based on vibration from sound waves. The technique is based on the fact that sound waves are mechanical waves that cau ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 4 2014 - 1:42pm

Weighing Trees- Now With Lasers

A terrestrial laser scanning technique that allows the structure of vegetation to be 3D-mapped to the millimeter is more accurate in determining the biomass of trees and carbon stocks in forests than current methods, according to a paper in Methods in Ecol ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 19 2014 - 3:00pm

"Air Laser" Created In The Lab

By Charles Q. Choi, Inside Science- A laser could be created with air in a practical way, a new advance that could one day be used to help spot explosives or pollutants from afar, researchers say. Laser light is generated by pumping energy into atoms or o ...

Article - Charles Choi - Jul 11 2015 - 8:21pm

Giant Billboards In 3-D, No Glasses Needed

Engineers in Austria have given us a blessing and a curse- they have created a giant laser system that sends beams in different directions, which makes them visible from many different angles.  The angular resolution is so fine that the left eye is presen ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 18 2015 - 10:00am

Optically Getting To The Same Side: How To Generating Möbius Strips Of Light

A collaboration of researchers have experimentally produced Möbius strips from the polarization of light, confirming a theoretical prediction that it is possible for light's electromagnetic field to assume this peculiar shape.  Möbius strips are easy ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 29 2015 - 5:51pm

Skyglow: Big Variations In The Radiance Of The Night

A team has undertaken what they call the most comprehensive examination of skyglow-  variations in the radiance of the night sky- ever done and found remarkably large variations in artificial night sky brightness at the different observation sites.   Light ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 12 2015 - 5:03pm