University of Otago physicists have used a small glass bulb containing an atomic vapor to demonstrate a new form of antenna for radio waves. The bulb was “wired up” with laser beams and could therefore be placed far from any receiver electronics.

Dr Susi Otto, from the Dodd-Walls Centre for Photonic and Quantum Technologies, led the field testing of the portable atomic radio frequency sensor.

Such sensors, that are enabled by atoms in a so-called Rydberg state, can provide superior performance over current antenna technologies as they are highly sensitive, have broad tunability, and small physical size, making them attractive for use in defence and communications.

For example, they c...

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is one of the deadliest cancers worldwide, with a 5-year survival rate of less than 10%. Many PDAC tumors in early stage go undetected because they are not found using conventional imaging methods, including fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (PET) scans...

An international team of scientists is rethinking the basic principles of radiation physics with the aim of creating super-bright light sources. In a new study published in Nature Photonics, researchers from the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) in Portugal, the University of Rochester, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Laboratoire d’Optique Appliquée in France proposed ways to use quasiparticles to create light sources as powerful as the most advanced ones in existence today, but much smaller.

Quasiparticles are formed by many electrons moving in sync...

Researchers from the University of Southampton, together with colleagues from the universities of Cambridge and Barcelona, have shown it’s theoretically possible for black holes to exist in perfectly balanced pairs — held in equilibrium by a cosmological force — mimicking a single black hole.

Black holes are massive astronomical objects that have such a strong gravitational pull that nothing, not even light, can escape. They are incredibly dense. A black hole could pack the mass of the Earth into a space the size of a pea.

Conventional theories about black holes, based on Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, typically explain how static or spinning black holes can exist on their own, isolated in space...