Playing stop and go with light
Light brought to a halt in ultracold gas could be used in quantum computation
Read article: Cell-phone capacity multiplies
Cell-phone capacity multiplies
Polarized electromagnetic waves boost the capacity of radio signals
Photonics and particles win 2001 King Faisal prize
Optical communications and cosmology are recognised by the prize
UK physics scoops extra money
The JIF scheme was set up in 1998 by the UK government and the Wellcome Trust – the world’s largest biomedical research charity – to provide much-needed funding for university labora...
Molecular fingerprints in sonoluminescence
Although researchers have proposed a wide variety of explanations for sonoluminescence, they are in broad agreement that the oscillating bubbles reach very high temperatures. Until now, however, singl...
Defects boost optical communications
In a photonic crystal the periodic variation of the dielectric constant results in a range of ‘forbidden’ frequencies called a photonic bandgap (PBG). Electromagnetic waves with a ‘f...
Read article: No thing goes faster than light
No thing goes faster than light
Nothing can travel faster than light. Despite a recent raft of reports in the media, this statement is as true now as it ever was. Nonetheless, experiments over the past 20 years have been forcing us ...
High-speed switching at low voltages
Converting electrical signals into optical pulses is one of the speed ‘bottlenecks’ in current telecommunications systems. To reach high data speeds, a series of electro-optic devices call...
Polymer outshines other mirrors
Dielectric mirrors are made of multiple layers of transparent materials, each of which reflects a small fraction of the light that hits it. At a specific layer thickness, the reflected light waves mer...
New tools for X-rays
Klaus Dieter Liss from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, and colleagues have created a cavity that traps X-ray photons between two thin plates of silicon (Nature 404 371...
