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 ...

Magnetic reconnection is a process that occurs when the magnetic fields of a conductive plasma quickly rearrange and release ...

Mode-locked lasers are advanced lasers that produce very short pulses of light, with durations ranging from femtoseconds to picoseconds. These lasers are widely used to study ultrafast and nonlinear ...

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 ...

To measure the effect, the researchers used a single calcium ion held almost motionless by electromagnetic fields in an ion ...

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.

The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to innovators in laser physics responsible for optical tweezers and high-intensity, ultrashort optical pulses. Stretchy genes. Half of the 2018 physics Nobel Prize ...

Once called a "solution looking for a problem," long before its full potential emerged, the laser has become a powerhouse of modern life. Thanks to sustained support from the U.S. National Science ...

Military surveillance and communication can be hampered by adverse conditions, such as fog, extreme temperatures or long distances. An engineer in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington ...

Gisela Eckhardt was one of the early pioneers in laser physics, discovering the principle behind the Raman laser in 1962. Valdas Pasiskevicius, Richard Mildren and David Burman tell the largely ...

The quest is on to make terahertz sources that are small, portable and capable of operating at room temperature. Such a breakthrough could lead to advances in everything from cancer screening to ...