Blog

In the past 10 years, the best-performing artificial-intelligence systems – such as the speech recognizers on smartphones or Google’s latest automatic translator – have resulted from a technique called “deep learning.” Deep learning is in fact a new name for...

Premature babies kept warm in neonatal incubators could soon be medically monitored with cameras rather than with sensors attached to their skin. The camera system was developed by École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), the Swiss Center for Electronics and...

A novel method for fabricating lasers uses saucer-shaped quantum dots (QDs) to produce continuous laser light that could be brighter, less expensive and more tuneable than current devices. Although the ability to produce laser light using colloidal QDs (CQDs) was...

Optomechanical devices, which simultaneously confine light waves and mechanical waves to permit interaction between them, can be used to study fundamental questions in physics and to sense motion similarly to electromechanical accelerometers. In smartphones, these electronic components switch the touchscreen...

Optics engineers at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California have developed a new anti-reflective coating for the giant laser system’s optics that should both boost the pulse energy delivered to target chamber and cut the rate at which damaged...

Tiny “black holes” on a silicon wafer make for a new type of photodetector that could move more data at lower cost around the world or across a datacenter. The technology, developed by electrical engineers at the University of California,...

Contrary to the tremendous success story of electronic integration, photonic integration is still in its infancy. One the most serious obstacles it faces is the need to use a variety of materials to achieve different functions – unlike electronic integration....

Using a tiny device known as an optical antenna, researchers have created an X-ray sensor that is integrated onto the end of an optical fiber just a few tens of microns in diameter. By detecting X-rays at an extremely small...

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) — an optical imaging tool for monitoring regional blood flow and tissue oxygenation — is being explored as an option to track the brain’s response to acute pain in adults and infants. The fNIRS technique is portable and...