Physicists at multiple institutions are compressing particle accelerators from facility-scale machines stretching hundreds of ...

A beam of electrons crossed just a few millimeters of plasma, then helped trigger an effect that usually belongs to massive ...

A group of scientists created "slits" in time, allowing them to send light through the slits in a twist on an experiment first run over 200 years ago. In the original experiment, scientists sent light ...

A new experiment has demonstrated something that sounds physically impossible – light itself casting a shadow. It turns out that if you manipulate a laser just right, then hit it side-on with another ...

A string of recent experiments has moved desktop-scale particle accelerators from theoretical curiosity to working prototypes ...

"In our work, we bring them together. By applying laser cooling techniques originally developed for atoms to a centimeter-scale torsional oscillator, we try to bridge the classical and quantum worlds.

Scientists at the University of Oxford have unveiled a pioneering method for capturing the full structure of ultra-intense laser pulses in a single measurement. The breakthrough, published in close ...

It's not at every university that laser pulses powerful enough to burn paper and skin are sent blazing down a hallway. But that’s what happened in UMD’s Energy Research Facility, an unremarkable ...

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 ...