It’s a cliché that “baseball is a game of inches,” but for hitters and pitchers, it’s more a game of millimeters. If the bat hits the ball a fraction of an inch too low or too high, the result is a popup or weak ground ball instead of a solid hit. A slightly larger error, […]

An entirely new structure of light is helping to measure chirality in molecules more accurately and robustly than ever before, in a major potential step for the pharmaceutical industry.

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To produce light, lasers typically rely on optical cavities, pairs of mirrors facing each other that amplify light by bouncing it back and forth. Recently, some physicists have been investigating the generation of “laser light” in open air without the use of optical cavities, a phenomenon known as cavity-free lasing in atmospheric air.

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The world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator may be producing the world’s tiniest droplets of liquid, right under scientists’ noses. Researchers are digging into this subatomic enigma.

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Optical materials are essential in many modern applications, but controlling the way a material reflects light on its surface is costly and difficult. Now, in a recent study, researchers from Japan found a simple and low-cost way of tuning the reflectance spectra of pencil lead samples using plasma. Their technique enabled them to produce pencil […]

Integrated photonic circuits operating at room temperature combined with optical nonlinear effects could revolutionize both classical and quantum signal processing. Scientists from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, in collaboration with other institutions from Poland as well as Italy, Iceland, and Australia, have demonstrated the creation of perovskite crystals with predefined shapes […]

The ratchet mechanism is a fascinating energy-conversion system that converts disorderly or random motion into orderly, directed movement through a process known as spontaneous rectification. It is a critical component of mechanical systems, typically consisting of a gear and a pawl, which restricts the movement of the gear in one direction.

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The electron shell of atoms acts as an “electromagnetic shield,” preventing direct access to the nucleus and its properties. A team in the group of Klaus Blaum, director at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, has now succeeded in precisely measuring the effect of this shielding in beryllium atoms. The study is […]