Optics

University of Utah scientists have used invisible infrared light to make rat heart cells contract.  Sounds interesting but not revolutionary, right?   But they also used infrared light to cause toadfish inner-ear cells to send signals to their brain - which might improve cochlear implants for deafness. The significance is the discovery that optical signals, short pulses of an invisible wavelength of infrared laser light delivered via a thin, glass optical fiber, can activate heart cells and inner-ear cells related to balance and hearing.    Infrared also activated…

One thing you probably know about black holes, no matter how much science you took, is that they have never actually been seen.   Instead, the science consensus is that masses that sit at the centers of galaxies like our own Milky Way are presumed to be black holes. Researchers in Nature Physics say a property of light called orbital angular momentum may be detectable because of a 'twist' in this momentum caused by black holes.  And we could detect it, if we just know what to look for. As Bo Thide, a co-author of the paper, explained to Jason Palmer at the BBC,  …

In case you don't know it, the Navy is not the 1970s "Village People" branch of the military.  These guys do some cool stuff and are making even cooler toys to do it with. Want to find future tech for megawatt-class laser beams in next-generation weapon systems?  The Navy.   Want to go completely science fiction and find work on a railgun with a projectile that rides an electromagnetic current to its target?  The Navy. Now they are redoing sunglasses.   Later this year, Special Warfare Command (those are SEALs to you and me) will get Fast-Tint Protective Eyewear…

We know that light has mass and that beaming enough light at something can push it away - solar sails that will move a craft through the cosmos are based on this idea and NASA tested that concept earlier today when it launched NanoSail-D, a nanosatellite (cubesat) which will unfold to a 100 square foot polymer sail and travel in low earth orbit for a few months. Sails?  We don't need no stinking sails.  Credit: NASA But research in Nature Photonics takes sails a step farther and generates actual lift using light.   A group of scientists were able to 'lift' their refractive wing…

Physicists from the University of Bonn have developed a completely new source of light, a Bose-Einstein condensate consisting of photons, something not known to be possible, which may potentially be suitable for designing light sources resembling lasers that work in the x-ray range. By cooling Rubidium atoms deeply and concentrating a sufficient number of them in a compact space, they suddenly become indistinguishable. They behave like a single huge "super particle." Physicists call this a Bose-Einstein condensate. For "light particles," or photons, this should also work. Unfortunately,…

It's been the decade of metamaterials, with breakthroughs toward an invisibility cloak occurring every few months.   With conventional materials, light typically travels along a straight line, but with metamaterials, scientists can exploit additional flexibility to create blind spots by deflecting certain parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.  Basically, an image can be altered or made to look like it has disappeared.  An optical invisibility cloak is still far in the future but now a team of researchers has extended that idea (mathematically) from a cloak that conceals…

Quantum cryptography is the technology of the future for military and financial organizations because it sends information as entangled particles of light - anyone who tries to tap into the information changes it in a way that reveals their presence. The data is encoded with an encrypted key but one important limitation is range.  The longest distance over which an encrypted key can be sent is approximately 100 kilometers but new technology developed by researchers increases 30-fold the amount of time the memory can hold information, which means that a series of quantum repeaters,…

Sure, high energy physics costs billions these days (and watch out for birds - and lightning) but table-top experiments with tuned lasers and sensitive detectors can also continue to achieve the precision necessary for exploring the basic laws of physics at the heart of relativity and quantum mechanics. Dmitry Budker and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley have used collimated beams of atoms to study parity violation, possible changes in the fine structure constant, and even the question of whether photons are exclusively bosons. Parity violation, the property by which…

Unable to exercise?   Some new research may be hope in keeping muscles from atrophy.   Researchers from Stanford University have shown how to use light to induce muscle contraction. But don't cancel your gym membership just yet.  The study used bioengineered mice whose nerve-cell surfaces were coated with special light-sensitive proteins. They used a technology known as optogenetics, which involves the insertion of a specialized gene derived from algae into the genomes of experimental animals. This gene encodes a light-sensitive protein that situates itself on nerve-cell…

A "cat state" is a curiosity of the quantum world, where particles can exist in "superpositions" of two opposite properties simultaneously. Cat state is a reference to German physicist Erwin Schrödinger's famed 1935 theoretical notion of a cat that is both alive and dead simultaneously. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have created "quantum cats" made of photons, particles of light, boosting prospects for manipulating light in new ways to enhance precision measurements as well as computing and communications based on quantum physics. The NIST team…