Over the past few decades, some physicists worldwide have been investigating unusual particle-like magnetic structures known as topological solitons. These structures could potentially be leveraged to ...

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 ...

A new sound-based laser could measure gravity with unprecedented precision and reshape navigation technology.

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 ...

Tailored profiles: The working principle of the new metalaser. The designed geometric phase profile is introduced to the metasurface by rotating the hole in each silicon nitride nanodisk. Then the ...

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.

For 26-year-old Dani, the quote on her ribcage once meant everything. "It was something about freedom and finding yourself," she says with a smile that edges toward embarrassment. "Now I just want to ...

Researchers have identified the mechanism by which high-powered lasers can cause rapidly expanding plasma to spontaneously generate magnetic fields within a billionth of a second. The discovery, based ...

Researchers from Bar-Ilan University have successfully recreated key features of black hole physics in a laboratory setting ...

The ZEUS laser facility at the University of Michigan has roughly doubled the peak power of any other laser in the U.S. with its first official experiment at 2 petawatts (2 quadrillion watts). At more ...

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to three physicists — Pierre Agostini at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ferenc Krausz at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American It wasn’t so long ago that I was in graduate ...