Retinal TV
The growth of virtual reality has increased demand for more realistic video displays, but existing head-up display helmets are expensive and difficult to use. Gerard de Wit and Joseph Braat at Delft h...
Amplification of matter waves
Bose-Einstein condensation itself was only observed for the first time in 1995. There has been intense interest in the process ever since because of the unique quantum behaviour displayed by matter in...
Missiles by day, planets at night
The $40 million Magdalena Ridge Observatory will use optical interferometry to merge light signals from three new telescopes into a single image. Researchers also hope to test new adaptive optics tech...
Read article: Light emission moves into the blue
Light emission moves into the blue
Shuji Nakamura describes the advances that enabled his group to develop blue light-emitting diodes and lasers
Larger lenses
Despite the popularity of cheap plastic lenses, glass lenses are still essential for many applications. To make a glass lens, a gob of molten glass is dropped onto a catching tool, which compresses it...
Organic laser breakthrough
Organic lasers are attractive for optical applications because they are inexpensive to manufacture, can be grown as thin films and have good temperature stability. Results from the Princeton team sugg...
Physicist shares Japan Prize
Leo Esaki, the physicist who is president of the University of Tsukuba, is one of the joint winners of this year's Japan Prize
Light gets in your eyes
To do this Levy adapted a technique used by solar astronomers in which a black disk is placed in the focal plane of the telescope. The size of the disk is chosen so that it exactly matches the SunR...
Perrin’s hypothesis reborn
In a unimolecular reaction a molecule breaks into two smaller molecules (or atoms) in a manner that appears to be independent of the chemical composition of its surrounding. The number of molecules fa...
Axis row rolls on
An old debate on the universe was reborn this month
