Researchers from Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Gothenburg present a new method, which can double the energy of a proton beam produced by laser-based particle accelerators. The breakthrough could lead to more compact, cheaper equipment that could be useful for many applications, including proton therapy.​​​ Proton therapy involves firing a beam…

Researchers, led by Professor Dr. Matthias Karg at the Institute of Physical Chemistry at Heinrich-Heine University Duesseldorf, report a simple technique for developing highly ordered particle layers. The group worked with tiny, deformable spherical polymer beads with a hydrogel-like structure. Hydrogels are water-swollen, three-dimensional networks. Such structures are used as super-absorbers in such products as…

The world watched in horror on April 15 as a massive fire raged at Notre-Dame de Paris, a medieval Catholic cathedral considered one of the world’s most magnificent examples of French Gothic architecture. The fast-moving inferno raged for 15 hours, destroying most of the church’s wooden roof and sending its 19th century spire crashing to the ground. Hundreds…

Superfast data processing using light pulses instead of electricity has been created by scientists. The invention uses magnets to record computer data which consume virtually zero energy, solving the dilemma of how to create faster data processing speeds without the accompanying high energy costs. Today’s data center servers consume between 2 to 5 percent of…

“Quantum technologies” utilize the unique phenomena of quantum superposition and entanglement to encode and process information, with potentially profound benefits to a wide range of information technologies from communications to sensing and computing. However, a major challenge in developing these technologies is that the quantum phenomena are very fragile, and only a handful of physical…

These are the journeys of the “StarChip Wafersize.” UC Santa Barbara students sent up, via balloon, a prototype miniature spacecraft that might eventually become the “wafercraft” that researchers posit could be propelled by lasers to achieve space travel at relativistic speeds to reach nearby star systems and exoplanets. So begins a journey, funded by NASA…

Scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) used giant lasers to flash-freeze water into its exotic superionic phase and record X-ray diffraction patterns to identify its atomic structure for the very first time—all in just a few billionths of a second. The findings are reported in Nature. In 1988, scientists first predicted that water would…

A new 3-D particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation tool developed by researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and CEA Saclay is enabling cutting-edge simulations of laser/plasma coupling mechanisms that were previously out of reach of standard PIC codes used in plasma research. More detailed understanding of these mechanisms is critical to the development of ultra-compact particle accelerators…

You’ve never heard Dean Martin like this. This recording of Martin’s classic “Volare” was transmitted wirelessly via a semiconductor laser—the first time a laser has been used as a radio frequency transmitter. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering…

For the first time, Yale University physicists have directly observed quantum behavior in the vibrations of a liquid body. A great deal of ongoing research is currently devoted to discovering and exploiting quantum effects in the motion of macroscopic objects made of solids and gases. This new experiment opens a potentially rich area of further…

National University of Singapore (NUS) physicists have discovered that recovered carbon black powder can be transformed by laser treatment to give a wide range of colors for potential display applications. Recovered carbon black powder is a common pigment produced from scrap rubber tires. There is a growing demand to use it as an environmentally friendly…

Scientists at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) discovered a new method to passivate defects in next generation optical materials to improve optical quality and enable the miniaturization of light emitting diodes and other optical elements. “From a chemistry standpoint, we have discovered a new photocatalytic reaction using laser light and water molecules, which is…

The optical laser has grown to a $10 billion global technology market since it was invented in 1960, and has led to Nobel prizes for Art Ashkin for developing optical tweezing and Gerard Mourou and Donna Strickland for work with pulsed lasers. Now a Rochester Institute of Technology researcher has teamed up with experts at…

Using ultrashort laser pulses lasting a few picoseconds (trillionths of a second), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers have discovered an efficient mechanism for laser ablation (material removal) that could help pave the way to the use of lower-energy, less costly lasers in many industrial laser processing applications. The new method, reported in a Journal…

So-called spin lasers may potentially accelerate data transfer in optical fiber cables to a considerable extent, while reducing energy consumption at the same time. Engineers at Ruhr-Universität Bochum have developed a novel concept for rapid data transfer via optical fiber cables. In current systems, a laser transmits light signals through the cables and information is…