When lasers were invented in the 1960s, they opened new avenues for scientific discovery and everyday applications, from ...

Scientists in the Riccio College of Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of California ...

Scientists have taken lasers beyond light and into the realm of sound, creating a breakthrough “phonon laser” that ...

Light usually travels in straight lines, but what if it could twist, spiral, and ...

Last year marked the 270th anniversary of Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod — but it’s more than a relic of history. The Franklin rod remains in use today because the simple design exploits some ...

Can light behave like a whirlwind? It turns out it can—and such "optical tornadoes" have now been created in an extremely ...

Strong field laser physics investigates the interaction between intense laser pulses and matter, a domain where non-linear phenomena such as multiphoton absorption, tunnelling ionisation, and ...

Scientists have developed a groundbreaking technique called RAVEN that can capture the full complexity of an ultra-intense laser pulse in a single shot—something previously thought nearly impossible.

Thomas White is an associate professor in the Department of Physics, and he’s interested in learning about what’s on the inside of planets and the states of matter it exists in. “The easiest question ...

Lunar laser ranging (LLR) remains one of the most incisive techniques for probing both the intricacies of the Earth–Moon system and the fundamental aspects of gravitational physics. By timing laser ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American It wasn’t so long ago that I was in graduate ...

For 26-year-old Dani, the quote on her ribcage once meant everything. "It was something about freedom and finding yourself," she says with a smile that edges toward embarrassment. "Now I just want to ...