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,...
Achieving optical super resolution
When light hits an object, diffraction causes the beam to spread over an area that depends on the aperture of the lens. The phase filters make this area smaller but also cause a reduction in the beam ...
Lasers, chaos, and bow-ties
Laser technology has come a long way since the 1960s. The very earliest lasers, such as ruby and helium-neon devices, were formidable contraptions. They relied on dilute active media with discrete ene...
Deuterium ‘shocked’ into metallic state
Gilbert Collins and colleagues used the NOVA laser at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California to carry out the experiments (Science 281 1178). The deuterium was placed in a small copp...
Making light work of gravity gradients
The interferometer was built by Mark Kasevich and colleagues at Yale University in the US and used individual atoms, rather than macroscopic man-made objects, to measure the gradient. By observing the...
