laser tagged posts

Researchers in Imperial College London’s Department of Materials have developed a new portable maser that can fit the size of a shoebox.

Imperial College London pioneered the discovery of room-temperature solid-state masers in 2012, highlighting their ability to amplify extremely faint electrical signals and demonstrate high-frequency stability. This was a significant discovery because microwave signals can pass through the Earth’s atmosphere more easily than other wavelengths of light. Additionally, microwaves have the capability to penetrate through the human body, a feat not achievable by lasers.

Masers have extensive applications in telecommunications systems—everything from mobile phone networks to satellite navigation systems...

An international team of researchers from Leibniz University Hannover (Germany), the University of Twente (Netherlands), and the start-up company QuiX Quantum has presented an entangled quantum light source fully integrated for the first time on a chip. The results of the study were published in the journal Nature Photonics.

“Our breakthrough allowed us to shrink the source size by a factor of more than 1,000, allowing reproducibility, stability over a longer time, scaling, and potentially mass-production. All these characteristics are required for real-world applications such as quantum processors,” says Prof. Dr...

Physicists at Delft University of Technology have built a new technology on a microchip by combining two Nobel Prize-winning techniques for the first time. This microchip could measure distances in materials at high precision—for example, underwater or for medical imaging.

Because the technology uses sound vibrations instead of light, it is useful for high-precision position measurements in opaque materials. The instrument could lead to new techniques to monitor the Earth’s climate and human health. The work is now published in Nature Communications.

Simple and low-power technolog...

Scientists said Monday they have used a laser beam to guide lightning for the first time, hoping the technique will help protect against deadly bolts—and one day maybe even trigger them.

Lightning strikes between 40-120 times a second worldwide, killing more than 4,000 people and causing billions of dollars worth of damage every year.

Yet the main protection against these bolts from above is still the humble lightning rod, which was first conceived by American polymath Benjamin Franklin in 1749.

A team of scientists from six research institutions have been working for years to use the same idea but replace the simple metal pole with a far more sophisticated and precise laser.

Now, in a study published in the journal Nature Photonics, they describe using a laser beam—shot...