Light can carry angular momentum in two distinct ways. One comes from polarization, which describes how the electric field ...

A new plasmonic fiber probe uses linearly polarized light and energy recycling for broadband nanofocusing with resolution ...

I learned in October 2022’s Breakthrough that the spikes of stars in high-power photos are called diffraction spikes. Why do they appear as two crosses at 45 degrees to each other? The diffraction ...

Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have measured “dark points” inside light waves that appear to ...

Increasingly complex applications such as artificial intelligence require ever more powerful and power-hungry computers to run. Optical computing is a proposed solution to increase speed and power ...

A U.K.-Portuguese research group is proposing a new solar cell design based on diffraction gratings – optical components that split and diffract light into several beams. They claim this could lead to ...

Using a highly coherent positronium beam, the researchers observed clear diffraction patterns after transmission through a graphene film, confirming its wave-like behavior. One of the discoveries that ...

Light microscopy is the only way in which we can look inside a living cell, or living tissues, in three dimensions. An electron microscope only gives a two-dimensional view, and the organic sample ...

Researchers at Harvard University and Jiangsu University developed a technique for not only identifying infected cells, but also tracking the infection over time as the cells developed. They published ...