Here’s a great picture from [Jelly & Marshmallows] that shows off the wild effects of melted chocolate poured onto a diffraction grating. A diffraction grating is a kind of optical component whose ...

Astronomers have spotted signs of an unusual, rainbow-like pattern decorating the surface of WASP-76b, a “hot Jupiter” exoplanet some 637 light-years away. The circular “glory” lights, if confirmed, ...

I learned in October 2022’s Breakthrough that the spikes of stars in high-power photos are called diffraction spikes. Why do they appear as two crosses at 45 degrees to each other? The diffraction ...

The spectrum of laser technologies available to hackers has gradually widened from basic gas lasers through CO2 tubes, diode lasers, and now fiber lasers. One of the newer entries is the MOPA laser, ...

(Nanowerk News) Graphene is a two-dimensional material that has been suggested for a wide range of applications in energy, technology, construction, and more since it was first isolated from graphite ...

Reconstructing the phase of a field from intensity measurements is an old and ubiquitous challenge, known as the phase retrieval problem 1,2,3. It has found numerous applications spanning from ...

One of the discoveries that fundamentally distinguished the emerging field of quantum physics from classical physics was the ...