Green look for red fluorescent lights
The technique works because two different ions, gadolinium and europium, are in the phosphor material. The UV light boosts a gadolinium ion to its excited state. This excess energy is then transferred...
New look for optical fibres
Fibre-optic cables usually consist of an inner core of highly refractive glass sheathed inside glass with a lower refractive index. Light travels along the inner core fibre by total internal reflectio...
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 ...
New clues to the left-handed origins of life
Fred Hoyle was the first to suggest that organic molecules developed in outer space and then fell to the earth, but it was not until the discovery of large quantities of left-handed amino acids in a m...
The shape of sonoluminescence
Sonoluminescence occurs because sound waves cause a bubble to expand and then collapse in a liquid. The bubble first expands to almost 10 times its original dimensions, and then collapses at supersoni...
Holographic storage sees light
Their technique works by using a process called two-colour holography. One wavelength of light records information on the crystal and another is used to read the data. Their method fires two light sou...
Retinal TV
The growth of virtual reality has increased demand for more realistic video displays, but existing head-up display helmets are expensive and difficult to use. Gerard de Wit and Joseph Braat at Delft h...
Amplification of matter waves
Bose-Einstein condensation itself was only observed for the first time in 1995. There has been intense interest in the process ever since because of the unique quantum behaviour displayed by matter in...
Missiles by day, planets at night
The $40 million Magdalena Ridge Observatory will use optical interferometry to merge light signals from three new telescopes into a single image. Researchers also hope to test new adaptive optics tech...
