Over the past several decades, researchers have been making rapid progress in harnessing light to enable all sorts of ...

Researchers have found that under certain conditions, a laser beam can act like an opaque object and cast a shadow, opening new possibilities for technologies that could use a laser beam to control ...

Nonlinear effects cause different parts of a wave to move at different velocities and distort the light's periodic sinusoidal pattern. These effects generate new wavelengths and result in what ...

[Seb Lee-Delisle]’s NES lightgun gave us pause as the effect is so cool we couldn’t quite figure out how he was doing it at first. When he pulls the trigger there erupts the beam of light Sci Fi has ...

A flash of light hits a simple iron crystal. In the space of a trillionth of a second, its magnetic behavior shifts, as if the solid briefly becomes something else.

For decades, scientists have sought ways to compress the tools of optical science – lasers, lenses, mirrors – onto chips that fit on a fingertip. Such ...

When an intense laser pulse hits an electron at rest, the latter performs a quiver motion with the frequency of the light ...

A new U.S. Army laser has more in common with Star Wars blasters than anything currently used by the military, firing a stream of bullet-like pulses of light that hit the target with explosive effects ...