optics – Quanta Magazine

Physicists Who Explored Tiny Glimpses of Time Win Nobel Prize

Charlie Wood — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 10:00:03 +0000

To catch a glimpse of the subatomic world’s unimaginably fleet-footed particles, you need to produce unimaginably brief flashes of light. Anne L’Huillier, Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz have shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for their pioneering work in developing the ability to illuminate reality on almost inconceivably brief timescales. Between the 1980s and the early 2000s...

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Physicists Pin Down How Quantum Uncertainty Sharpens Measurements

Ben Brubaker — Tue, 03 May 2022 13:55:19 +0000

Scientific progress has been inseparable from better measurements. Before 1927, only human ingenuity seemed to limit how precisely we could measure things. Then Werner Heisenberg discovered that quantum mechanics imposes a fundamental limit on the precision of some simultaneous measurements. The better you pin down a particle’s position, for instance, the less certain you can possibly be about its...

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Mitochondria Double as Tiny Lenses in the Eye

Yasemin Saplakoglu — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 15:48:56 +0000

A mosquito watches you through a lattice of microscopic lenses. You stare back, fly swatter in hand, closely tracking the bloodsucker with your humble single-lens eyes. But it turns out that the way you see each other — and the world — may have more in common than you might think. A study published last month in Science Advances found that inside mammalian eyes, mitochondria...

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Alchemy Arrives in a Burst of Light

Philip Ball — Wed, 30 Sep 2020 14:30:27 +0000

The idea sounds like magic, pure and simple. You create a light beam that can make substances vanish, give them properties they shouldn’t possess, or turn them into a perfect mimic of another substance entirely. It’s 21st-century alchemy, in principle capable not just of making lead resemble gold, but of turning ordinary materials into superconductors. The general approach...

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Social Distancing From the Stars

Emily Levesque — Tue, 11 Aug 2020 15:00:42 +0000

Astronomers treasure the beauty of our jobs. We may spend much of our time poring over data and digging into the language of math and physics to describe the cosmos, but we also get the unique opportunity to travel to some of the darkest corners of the world for our research. Most of us can’t resist taking a few moments during a busy visit to a remote observatory to drink in our surroundings.

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