CERN confirms direct CP violation
Charge-parity (CP) symmetry implies that particles and antiparticles behave like mirror images of each other. Charge conjugation changes particles into their antiparticles – e.g., electrons beco...
Defects work for laser
The photonic crystal was made by using an ion beam to drill a 2D hexagonal array of holes in a layer of indium gallium arsenide phosphide (InGaAsP). The regular spacing of the holes means that only ce...
Arthur Schawlow, laser pioneer, dies
Schawlow was born in New York and educated at the University of Toronto, where he received his first degree in 1941 and his PhD in 1949. After a spell at Columbia University, where he worked with Char...
Lasers fuel path to fusion
The clusters were produced by expanding a deuterium gas jet into a vacuum. A laser beam focussed near the top of the plume heats the clusters, causing them to explode. This creates a small plasma of h...
Laser accelerators receive a boost
Physicists hope to develop new ways of accelerating particles because of the high cost and large size of traditional accelerators. Electrons in standard accelerators gain energy by surfing large elect...
Stochastic resonance tracked down
Vertical cavity lasers work by having a quantum well sandwiched between alternating layers of gallium arsenide (GaAs) and aluminium gallium arsenide (AlGaAs). As the two materials have different refra...
Patents for microlasers
The world-wide patent rights have been licensed by the university to Nanovation Technologies in Florida. The company hopes to develop an optical circuit which would contain thousands of microcavity la...
Taking a closer look at “big G”
The gravitational constant was first measured by Lord Cavendish in 1798, who used a torsion-balance to measure the force between a pair of lead spheres. Cavendish measured G to be 6.754 x 10-11 metres...
Laser emits multi-wavelength light
Semiconductor lasers are usually monocromatic because the electrons stored in energy bands do not emit any photons unless they move out of the semiconductor’s conduction band. Federico Capasso a...
Microlasers get even smaller
Attempts to scale down current laser designs have been made before, but the devices were not efficient enough for real applications. Now a group of researchers from Darmstadt University of Technology,...
