Blog

It’s a truism that mechanical devices will eventually break down, and this applies to mechanical laser-beam steering systems as well as the family automobile. In particular, for chemical sensing and lidar applications, mid-infrared beam scanning needs to be rapid and...

Using a multimode optical fiber as thin as a human hair, scientists at the Leibniz-Institute of Photonic Technology have observed at high resolution the neuronal structures inside deep brain areas of living mice. The researchers drew on holographic methods for...

If electron accelerators could be made small and cheap enough, not only would every university be able to afford its own accelerator laboratory, but inexpensive coherent x-ray beam sources for photolithographic processes in the semiconductor industry could be made available,...

New types of ultrathin materials that could replace the conventional glass lenses used in cameras and imaging systems. Typically the new sorts of metalenses are not made of glass. Instead, they consist of materials constructed at the nanoscale in arrays...

Microscopes make the invisible visible. And compared to conventional light microscopes, transmission x-ray microscopes (TXM) can see into samples with much higher resolution, revealing extraordinary details. Researchers across a wide range of scientific fields use TXM to see the structural...

Using machine-learning and an integrated photonic chip, researchers from INRS (Canada) and the University of Sussex (UK) can now customize the properties of broadband light sources. Also called “supercontinuum”, these sources are at the core of new imaging technologies and...

Using a femtosecond laser, a team of researchers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (Greenbelt, MD) has shown that it can effectively weld glass to copper, glass to glass, and drill hair-sized pinholes in different materials for use in spaceflight...

Researchers at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, in collaboration with Polaris Sensor Technologies Inc., have developed a new type of thermal imaging camera that allows soldiers to see hidden objects that were previously undetectable. Kristan Gurton, an experimental physicist in...

What do the ears of geckos and the photodetecting pixels in your camera have in common? Both gain a big advantage when they can measure the direction of the source—and both are fundamentally limited by size. But while evolution has...

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley; Berkeley, CA) have developed a flexible sensor that uses organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) to map blood-oxygen levels over large areas of skin, tissue, and organs, with the goal of giving doctors...