Devising the best treatment for a patient with cancer requires doctors to know something about the traits of the cancer from which the patient is suffering. But one of the greatest difficulties in treating cancer is that cancer cells are not all the same. Even within the same tumor, cancer cells can differ in their…
Laser Light Examines how Epilepsy Arises in the Healthy Brain
Scientists at McGill University have developed a new method to study how seizures arise in the healthy brain. Using laser light guided through ultra-thin optic fibers in the brain of rodents, the researchers “turned on” light-sensitive proteins in selective brain cells and were able to eventually cause seizures through repeated laser stimulation. These findings were…
Researchers Develop Miniaturized, Laser-driven Particle Accelerator
Munich physicists have succeeded in demonstrating plasma wakefield acceleration of subatomic particles in a miniaturized, laser-driven model. The new system provides a broader basis for the development of the next generation of particle accelerators. The plasma wakefield acceleration (PWFA) technique is regarded as a highly promising route to the next generation of particle accelerators. In…
Lasers Probe the Limits of Gravitational Wave Instruments
Since the historic finding of gravitational waves from two black holes colliding over a billion light years away was made in 2015, physicists are advancing knowledge about the limits on the precision of the measurements that will help improve the next generation of tools and technology used by gravitational wave scientists. LSU Department of Physics…
Researchers Develop On-chip, Electronically Tunable Frequency Comb
Lasers play a vital role in everything from modern communications and connectivity to bio-medicine and manufacturing. Many applications, however, require lasers that can emit multiple frequencies—colors of light—simultaneously, each precisely separated like the tooth on a comb. Optical frequency combs are used for environmental monitoring to detect the presence of molecules, such as toxins; in…
Laser Light Controls Chirality of Molecules
Seven of the ten most frequent medications contain chiral agents. These are molecules that occur in right- or left-handed forms. During chemical synthesis both forms usually occur in equal parts and have to be separated afterward, because chirality determines the agent’s effect in the body. Physicists at Goethe University have now succeeded in using laser…
Light-shaking Device is a Breakthrough for Photonics
Lasers Tweeze and Pole Protein Droplets
University at Buffalo physicists are using innovative tools to study the properties of a bizarre class of molecules that may play a role in disease: proteins that cluster together to form spherical droplets inside human cells. The scientists’ latest research sheds light on the conditions that drive such droplets to switch from a fluid, liquidy…
Laser Measurement Technique Could Revolutionize Fiber-optic Communications
A team of researchers from the University of St Andrews has achieved a breakthrough in the measurement of lasers which could revolutionize the future of fiber-optic communications. The new research, published in Optics Letters, reveals the team of scientists has developed a low-cost and highly-sensitive device capable of measuring the wavelength of light with unprecedented…
Lasers and Shellfish Reveal Clues into Ancient Climate
Shellfish played a significant role in the diet of prehistoric coastal populations, providing valuable nutrients. They are a common find in archaeological sites all over the world, usually in huge numbers, and researchers have long explored how they could be used to make inferences about the environments that humans experienced at those locations in the…
New Laser Beam Shape Can ‘Sneak’ through Opaque Media
Researchers have found a way to pre-treat a laser beam so that it enters opaque surfaces without dispersing—like a headlight that’s able to cut through heavy fog at full strength. The discovery from scientists at Yale University and the Missouri University of Science & Technology has potential applications for deep-tissue imaging and optogenetics, in which…
Scientists Construct Anti-laser Based on Random Scattering
The laser is the perfect light source: As long as it is provided with energy, it generates light of a specific, well-defined color. However, it is also possible to create the opposite – an object that perfectly absorbs light of a particular color and dissipates the energy almost completely. At TU Wien (Vienna), a method…
Researchers Craft First Supersymmetric Laser Array
A team of University of Central Florida researchers has overcome a long-standing problem in laser science, and the findings could have applications in surgery, drilling and 3D laser mapping. Using the principle of supersymmetry, they have developed the first supersymmetric laser array. Their findings were published recently in the journal Science. Supersymmetry is a conjecture…
Laser ‘Drill’ Sets New World Record
Combining a first laser pulse to heat up and “drill” through a plasma, and another to accelerate electrons to incredibly high energies in just tens of centimeters, scientists have nearly doubled the previous record for laser-driven particle acceleration. The laser-plasma experiments, conducted at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), are pushing…
Laser-Driven Particle Accelerator Produces Paired Electron Beams
Particle accelerator-based radiation sources are an indispensable tool in modern physics and medicine. Some of the larger specimens, such as the LHC in Geneva or the European XFEL in Hamburg, are among the most complex (and costly) scientific instruments ever constructed. Now, laser physicists at the Laboratory for Attosecond Physics (LAP), which is run jointly…
‘Astrocomb’ Provides Precision for Planet-Hunting Telescope
The hunt for Earth-like planets, and perhaps extraterrestrial life, just got more precise, thanks to record-setting starlight measurements made possible by a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) “astrocomb.” NIST’s custom-made frequency comb—which precisely measures frequencies, or colors, of light—ensures the precision of starlight analysis by an instrument called a spectrograph at the Hobby-Eberly…
Polariton Filter Transforms Ordinary Laser Light into Quantum Light
Lasers and Silicon Offer a Glimpse into the Future
Ten years into the future. That’s about how far UC Santa Barbara electrical and computer engineering professor John Bowers and his research team are reaching with the recent development of their mode-locked quantum dot lasers on silicon. It’s technology that not only can massively increase the data transmission capacity of data centers, telecommunications companies and…
Buckyball Transformation Achieved Using Light
C60 is an extremely well-studied carbon molecule, which consists of 60 carbon atoms and is structured like a soccer ball. The macromolecule is also known as buckminsterfullerene (or buckyball), a name given as a tribute to the architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, who designed buildings with similar shapes. Laser physicists have now irradiated buckyballs with infrared…
Researchers Capture Snapshots of Respiratory Helpers
Cytochrome c oxidase (CcO) is the last enzyme in the respiratory electron transport chain of cells located in the mitochondrial membrane. It receives an electron from each of four cytochrome c molecules, and transfers them to one oxygen molecule (two atoms), converting the molecular oxygen to two molecules of water. Researchers at CASD, including ASU’s…
Smallest-Ever Optical Frequency Comb Developed
Optical frequency combs are laser sources whose spectrum consists of a series of discrete, equally spaced frequency lines that can be used for precise measurements. In the last two decades, they have become a major tool for applications such as precise distance measurement, spectroscopy, and telecommunications. Most of the commercially available optical frequency comb sources…
Physicists Reach Breakthrough in Nanolaser Design
Nanolasers have recently emerged as a new class of light sources that have a size of only a few millionths of a meter and unique properties remarkably different from those of macroscopic lasers. However, it is almost impossible to determine at what current the output radiation of the nanolaser becomes coherent, while for practical applications,…
Laser Physicists Reach Breakthrough in Data Acquisition Time
Laser physicists have succeeded in reducing the acquisition time for data required for reliable characterization of multidimensional electron motions by a factor of 1,000. It may sound paradoxical, but capturing the ultrafast motions of subatomic particles is actually very time-consuming. Experiments designed to track the dynamics of electrons often take weeks. Mapping the frantic gyrations…
Environmentally Stable Laser Emits Remarkably Pure Light
Researchers have developed a compact laser that emits light with extreme spectral purity that doesn’t change in response to environmental conditions. The new potentially portable laser could benefit a host of scientific applications, improve clocks for global positioning (GPS) systems, advance the detection of gravitational waves in space and be useful for quantum computing. Researchers…