Understanding diffraction and dispersion is key to optical science, influencing technologies like spectroscopy, fiber optics, ...

Plasma, ionized gas and the fourth state of matter, makes up over 99% of the ordinary matter in the universe. Understanding ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it. This article is more than 4 years old. Light is well known to exhibit ...

Thomas Young, born 250 years ago this week, was a polymath who made seminal contributions in fields from physics to Egyptology. But perhaps his most enduring legacy is proving Isaac Newton wrong about ...

A celebrated experiment in 1801 showed that light passing through two thin slits interferes with itself, forming a characteristic striped pattern on the wall behind. Now, physicists have shown that a ...

A nanoscale optical device has been developed that allows independent control over the intensity and phase of light. By ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it. When we divide up matter into the smallest possible chunks that it's ...

"These single atoms are like the smallest slits you could possibly build." For over 100 years, quantum physics has taught us that light is both a wave and a particle. Now, researchers at the ...

Schematic of the MIT experiment: Two single atoms floating in a vacuum chamber are illuminated by a laser beam and act as the two slits. The interference of the scattered light is recorded with a ...

Researchers discovered brand new interference patterns in twisted two-dimensional tungsten ditelluride lattices. These patterns can be tuned to look like periodic spots or even one-dimensional bands ...