Ultra-intense ultrashort lasers have a wide-ranging scope of applications, encompassing basic physics, national security, industrial service, and health care. In basic physics, such lasers have become ...

GaN-based vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) are promising for displays, sensing and optical communication, but ...

Last year marked the 270th anniversary of Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod — but it’s more than a relic of history. The Franklin rod remains in use today because the simple design exploits some ...

Scientists have developed a groundbreaking technique called RAVEN that can capture the full complexity of an ultra-intense laser pulse in a single shot—something previously thought nearly impossible.

Thomas White is an associate professor in the Department of Physics, and he’s interested in learning about what’s on the inside of planets and the states of matter it exists in. “The easiest question ...

Tailored profiles: The working principle of the new metalaser. The designed geometric phase profile is introduced to the metasurface by rotating the hole in each silicon nitride nanodisk. Then the ...

While the world continues to fixate on AI, there are still plenty of high performance computing workloads that need doing and a speedup to any one part can have a big impact, whether it be ...

For 26-year-old Dani, the quote on her ribcage once meant everything. "It was something about freedom and finding yourself," she says with a smile that edges toward embarrassment. "Now I just want to ...

The quest is on to make terahertz sources that are small, portable and capable of operating at room temperature. Such a breakthrough could lead to advances in everything from cancer screening to ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American It wasn’t so long ago that I was in graduate ...