Tailoring light is much like tailoring cloth, cutting and snipping to turn a bland fabric into one with some desired pattern. In the case of light, the tailoring is usually done in the spatial degrees ...

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 ...

Lasers are known for the monochromatic nature of their light, so much so that you might never have thought there could be such a thing as a white laser. But in the weird world of physics, a lot of ...

Although the detailed physics of what goes on inside a laser is typically complex, all conventional lasers share a common basic operational principle: a process known as the stimulated emission of ...

Short pulses from a laser can be twisted into a series of doughnut-like vortices, offering a way to transmit more information using light. We usually encounter vortices in water and air, but similar ...