From the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory The newly upgraded Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory successfully produced its first X-rays, and researchers around the world are already lined up to kick off an ambitious science program. The upgrade, called LCLS-II, creates unparalleled capabilities…
MKS Unveils New Spectra-Physics Broadly-Tunable Ultrafast Laser for Multiphoton Imaging
MKS Instruments introduces its Spectra-Physics® InSight® X3+, the fourth generation of its broadly tunable, ultrafast laser platform, delivering industry-leading power, a 50% increase over the previous generation, at bioimaging wavelengths for brighter and deeper imaging. The new laser is built on the proven InSight laser platform with hundreds of peer-reviewed publications, the largest installed base…
Organic Laser Diodes Move From Dream to Reality
Researchers from Japan have demonstrated that a long-elusive kind of laser diode based on organic semiconductors is indeed possible, paving the way for the further expansion of lasers in applications such as biosensing, displays, healthcare, and optical communications. Long considered a holy grail in the area of light-emitting devices, organic laser diodes use carbon-based organic…
Proton Beam Energy Doubled with Colliding Lasers
Researchers from Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Gothenburg present a new method, which can double the energy of a proton beam produced by laser-based particle accelerators. The breakthrough could lead to more compact, cheaper equipment that could be useful for many applications, including proton therapy. Proton therapy involves firing a beam…
Ultra-thin Superlattices for Nanophotonics Formed from Gold Nanoparticles
Researchers, led by Professor Dr. Matthias Karg at the Institute of Physical Chemistry at Heinrich-Heine University Duesseldorf, report a simple technique for developing highly ordered particle layers. The group worked with tiny, deformable spherical polymer beads with a hydrogel-like structure. Hydrogels are water-swollen, three-dimensional networks. Such structures are used as super-absorbers in such products as…
Lasers could save Notre-Dame Cathedral
The world watched in horror on April 15 as a massive fire raged at Notre-Dame de Paris, a medieval Catholic cathedral considered one of the world’s most magnificent examples of French Gothic architecture. The fast-moving inferno raged for 15 hours, destroying most of the church’s wooden roof and sending its 19th century spire crashing to the ground. Hundreds…
Energy-free Superfast Computing with Light Pulses
Superfast data processing using light pulses instead of electricity has been created by scientists. The invention uses magnets to record computer data which consume virtually zero energy, solving the dilemma of how to create faster data processing speeds without the accompanying high energy costs. Today’s data center servers consume between 2 to 5 percent of…
Nitrogen-vacancy Centers Created by Ultrafast Laser Pulses
“Quantum technologies” utilize the unique phenomena of quantum superposition and entanglement to encode and process information, with potentially profound benefits to a wide range of information technologies from communications to sensing and computing. However, a major challenge in developing these technologies is that the quantum phenomena are very fragile, and only a handful of physical…
Laser-propelled Spacecraft Could Shorten Journey to Mars
These are the journeys of the “StarChip Wafersize.” UC Santa Barbara students sent up, via balloon, a prototype miniature spacecraft that might eventually become the “wafercraft” that researchers posit could be propelled by lasers to achieve space travel at relativistic speeds to reach nearby star systems and exoplanets. So begins a journey, funded by NASA…
Giant Lasers Crystallize Water Using Shockwaves
Scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) used giant lasers to flash-freeze water into its exotic superionic phase and record X-ray diffraction patterns to identify its atomic structure for the very first time—all in just a few billionths of a second. The findings are reported in Nature. In 1988, scientists first predicted that water would…
Perfect Material for Lasers Proposed by Researchers
Weyl semimetals are a recently discovered class of materials, in which charge carriers behave the way electrons and positrons do in particle accelerators. Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and Ioffe Institute in St. Petersburg have shown that these materials represent perfect gain media for lasers. The research findings were published in…
Researchers Achieve Breakthrough in Laser, Plasma Interactions
A new 3-D particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation tool developed by researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and CEA Saclay is enabling cutting-edge simulations of laser/plasma coupling mechanisms that were previously out of reach of standard PIC codes used in plasma research. More detailed understanding of these mechanisms is critical to the development of ultra-compact particle accelerators…
Researchers Develop the First Laser Radio Transmitter
You’ve never heard Dean Martin like this. This recording of Martin’s classic “Volare” was transmitted wirelessly via a semiconductor laser—the first time a laser has been used as a radio frequency transmitter. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering…
Lasers Allow for Smart Tattoos without Needles
A tattoo that could warn you for too many hours of sunlight exposure, or is alerting you for taking your medication? Next to their cosmetic role, tattoos could get new functionality using intelligent ink. However, that would require a more precise and less invasive injection technique. Researchers of the University of Twente have developed a…
Lasers Cause Magnets to Act Like Fluids
For years, researchers have pursued a strange phenomenon: When you hit an ultra-thin magnet with a laser, it suddenly de-magnetizes. Imagine the magnet on your refrigerator falling off. Now, scientists at CU Boulder are digging into how magnets recover from that change, regaining their properties in a fraction of a second. According to a study…
Novel Laser Experiment Dives into Quantum Physics in a Liquid
For the first time, Yale University physicists have directly observed quantum behavior in the vibrations of a liquid body. A great deal of ongoing research is currently devoted to discovering and exploiting quantum effects in the motion of macroscopic objects made of solids and gases. This new experiment opens a potentially rich area of further…
Lasers Transform Carbon Black Powder into Multicolor Fluorescence Displays
National University of Singapore (NUS) physicists have discovered that recovered carbon black powder can be transformed by laser treatment to give a wide range of colors for potential display applications. Recovered carbon black powder is a common pigment produced from scrap rubber tires. There is a growing demand to use it as an environmentally friendly…
New Technique Allows Ultrafast 3D Images of Nanostructures
New Laser Processing Method Increases Efficiency of Optoelectronic Devices
Scientists at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) discovered a new method to passivate defects in next generation optical materials to improve optical quality and enable the miniaturization of light emitting diodes and other optical elements. “From a chemistry standpoint, we have discovered a new photocatalytic reaction using laser light and water molecules, which is…
Researchers Develop New Form of Laser for Sound
The optical laser has grown to a $10 billion global technology market since it was invented in 1960, and has led to Nobel prizes for Art Ashkin for developing optical tweezing and Gerard Mourou and Donna Strickland for work with pulsed lasers. Now a Rochester Institute of Technology researcher has teamed up with experts at…
New Technique Improves Laser-material Interaction
Using ultrashort laser pulses lasting a few picoseconds (trillionths of a second), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers have discovered an efficient mechanism for laser ablation (material removal) that could help pave the way to the use of lower-energy, less costly lasers in many industrial laser processing applications. The new method, reported in a Journal…
Spin Lasers Enable Rapid Data Transfer
So-called spin lasers may potentially accelerate data transfer in optical fiber cables to a considerable extent, while reducing energy consumption at the same time. Engineers at Ruhr-Universität Bochum have developed a novel concept for rapid data transfer via optical fiber cables. In current systems, a laser transmits light signals through the cables and information is…
Cancer Cells Scrutinized with Laser Technology
Devising the best treatment for a patient with cancer requires doctors to know something about the traits of the cancer from which the patient is suffering. But one of the greatest difficulties in treating cancer is that cancer cells are not all the same. Even within the same tumor, cancer cells can differ in their…
Laser Light Examines how Epilepsy Arises in the Healthy Brain
Scientists at McGill University have developed a new method to study how seizures arise in the healthy brain. Using laser light guided through ultra-thin optic fibers in the brain of rodents, the researchers “turned on” light-sensitive proteins in selective brain cells and were able to eventually cause seizures through repeated laser stimulation. These findings were…
Researchers Develop Miniaturized, Laser-driven Particle Accelerator
Munich physicists have succeeded in demonstrating plasma wakefield acceleration of subatomic particles in a miniaturized, laser-driven model. The new system provides a broader basis for the development of the next generation of particle accelerators. The plasma wakefield acceleration (PWFA) technique is regarded as a highly promising route to the next generation of particle accelerators. In…