Blog

Try a quick experiment: Take two flashlights into a dark room and shine them so that their light beams cross. Notice anything peculiar? The rather anticlimactic answer is, probably not. That’s because the individual photons that make up light do...

For photographers and scientists, lenses are lifesavers. They reflect and refract light, making possible the imaging systems that drive discovery through the microscope and preserve history through cameras. But today’s glass-based lenses are bulky and resist miniaturization. Next-generation technologies, such...

Producing the perfect color images we need and love often requires multiple, heavy lenses so that each color focuses in exactly the same plane. Now Penn State engineers have developed a new theory that solves the problem using a single...

In recent years, scientists and engineers have had considerable success building metasurfaces dotted with arrays of plasmonic nanoparticles, to create materials with sometimes exotic optical properties. Far more difficult has been taking the construction to the third dimension—assembling nanoparticle lattices...

A heart attack, or myocardial infarction (MI), can cause considerable damage to the tissues of the heart, and a better understanding of that damage would be a valuable step towards improved treatment and therapy after the attack. Researchers at the...

To measure force orientation, the researchers used a technique called fluorescence polarization microscopy, which measures the orientation of a fluorophore by exciting it with light polarized at a series of distinct angles....

How can driverless cars detect obstructions when it’s foggy outside? What new forms of light communications can supercharge the internal housekeeping of data centers to enable ever-faster cloud computing? Can we detect a gas leak along a 1,000-mile pipeline remotely,...

The research team that announced the first optical rectenna in 2015 is now reporting a two-fold efficiency improvement in the devices - and a switch to air-stable diode materials. The improvements could allow the rectennas - which convert electromagnetic fields...

For quantum dot (QD) materials to perform well in devices such as solar cells, the nanoscale crystals in them need to pack together tightly so that electrons can hop easily from one dot to the next and flow out as...

Researchers have developed the first instrument that can provide a detailed image of the entire eye. By incorporating a lens that changes optical parameters in response to an electric current, the innovative technology can produce higher quality images than currently...