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...
Physicists invent “left-handed” material
Four years ago John Pendry of Imperial College, London, described how a composite copper structure could be used to create a material with negative electric permittivity, and more recently he proposed...
How to keep your optical fibres clear and dry
Thomas’s group measured the spatial distribution of water in the glass rods from which the optical fibres are drawn. They discovered that water diffuses into the molten, flowing glass much faste...
New technique promises cheaper photonic crystals
The method works by solidifying a resin that hardens when exposed to light. The resin is solidified into a three-dimensional grid by placing it in the interference pattern set up by four intersecting ...
New light on organic LEDs
Light emission from organic materials occurs through two separate processes: fluorescence – the process by which today’s organic semiconductors produce light – and phosphorescence. I...
Atom opticians think small
Mara Prentiss and colleagues at Harvard University in the US mounted two short wires on a sapphire substrate (Phys. Rev. Lett. 84 1124). When electric currents flow in opposite directions through the ...
Adaptive-optics to cover the sky
Adaptive-optic telescopes differ from normal telescopes by using a thin flexible primary mirror that can easily be deformed. A bright guide star near the observing area acts as a “beacon” ...
Solitons formed in Bose–Einstein condensate
Bose–Einstein condensates are trapped atoms that are cooled to low temperatures and occupy the same quantum state. They are ideal for studying and manipulating quantum effects such as solitons a...
Newton tops PhysicsWeb poll
Almost 400 people took part in the PhysicsWeb poll, each one naming their top-five physicists. The votes for each physicist were added up and weighted according to how they were ranked by individual v...
