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 ...

Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman and his student Nagendra Nath published a series of papers in 1936 on the diffraction of light by a liquid in the field of a high frequency sound wave. This was ...

Increasingly complex applications such as artificial intelligence require ever more powerful and power-hungry computers to run. Optical computing is a proposed solution to increase speed and power ...

A pulse of light sets the tempo in the material. Atoms in a crystalline sheet just a few atoms thick begin to move—not randomly, but in a coordinated rhythm, twisting and untwisting in sync like ...