Can light itself cast a shadow? It may sound like a philosophical riddle, but researchers have found that under certain conditions, a laser beam can act like an opaque object and cast a shadow. The ...

A small international team of nanotechnologists, engineers and physicists has developed a way to force laser light into becoming a supersolid. Their paper is published in the journal Nature. The ...

It’s a rare person who can pick up a cheap laser pointer and not wield it like a lightsaber or a phaser, complete with sound effects. There’s just something about the “pew-pew” factor that makes ...

Scientists at MIT discovered that chaotic laser light can spontaneously form a highly focused beam instead of scattering—if the conditions are just right. This “pencil beam” enabled them to image the ...

Researchers at the University of Basel and the ETH in Zurich have succeeded in changing the polarity of a special ferromagnet using a laser beam. In the future, this method could be used to create ...