Phonons are the collective vibrations that move through a solid. They can be thought of as waves traveling across the atomic ...

A pair of photons enters an optical maze, and sometimes they leave as something new. Not new in the everyday sense, since both were still photons when they came out.

In a new study ( Nature Physics, "Orbital Seebeck effect induced by chiral phonons" ), researchers developed the most ...

Optical holography is a powerful method for recording and reconstructing complete optical field information, including intensity and phase. It has found extensive applications in various fields, such ...

When a magnetic material is bombarded with short pulses of laser light, it loses its magnetism within femtoseconds (10 –15 seconds). The spin, or angular momentum, of the electrons in the material ...

Photons can have half-integer values of angular momentum when they are confined to fewer than three dimensions. That is the conclusion of physicists in Ireland, who have revived an experiment first ...

In an introductory physics course, there are three big ideas. There is the work-energy principle, the momentum principle and then the angular momentum principle. I'll skip the work-energy principle ...

We live and die by data these days. Data rates and latencies are everything, with data centers and chips designed to maximize communication speeds. The hero in the world of data is the optical fiber.

Introduction You might have seen figure skaters spinning around quickly and then tucking their arms to spin faster—or opening them to spin more slowly. This happens, thanks to a physics concept known ...