Light powers everything from communications to sensing, yet even tiny imperfections can scatter it and weaken signals. To ...

Scientists have created a new class of laser beam that appears to violate long-held laws of light physics. These new beams, which the team calls “spacetime wave packets,” follow different rules of ...

By squeezing terahertz light beyond its usual limits, researchers have exposed hidden quantum "jiggles" inside a ...

Light's behavior seems counterintuitive. That is, until you figure out light is a wave. The way light behaves can seem very counterintuitive, and many physicists would agree with that, but once you ...

First sight?: CERN's ATLAS collaboration claims to see light-by-light scattering for first time The idea that particles of light can interact with one another – known as light-by-light scattering – ...

Light can’t seem to keep itself together—at least in two dimensions—according to new findings from the University of Colorado Boulder. This research found that when a dimension is removed from light’s ...

Given their tiny size, individual atoms are notoriously tricky to see and manipulate, but finding ways to do so would be extremely useful. The invention of the laser in the 1960s eventually led to the ...

A new way of creating specially shaped pulses of ultrasound using light and a 3D printer has been unveiled by Michael Brown and colleagues at University College London. The pulses, which are creating ...

In a vacuum like space, the speed of light is just over 186,280 miles per second. Scientists have now shown it's possible to slow it down to zero miles per second without sacrificing its brightness, ...

There's an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which John de Lancie's nearly-omnipotent alien character "Q" is stripped of his powers and banished to the Enterprise as a human because fans of ...