RPMC Lasers Blog

NASA is using tabletop exercises to test how electric air taxis will fit safely into the national airspace, allowing passengers to one day hop across town or to a neighboring city. The agency partnered with industry, academia, and other government agencies in a series of 10 expert-led tabletop exercises to examine technical, operational, and regulatory gaps and define the best use of combined resources to add… Read More

The breakthrough came in an impossibly small slice of time, less than it takes a beam of light to move an inch. In that tiny moment, nuclear fusion as an energy source went from far-away dream to reality. The world is now grappling with the implications of the historic milestone. For Arthur Pak and the countless other scientists who’ve spent decades getting to this point, the work is just beginning…
We found that a typical commercial toilet generates a strong upward jet of air with velocities exceeding 6.6 feet per second (2 meters per second), rapidly carrying these particles up to 5 feet (1.5 meters) above the bowl within eight seconds of the start of th… Read More

Toilets are designed to efficiently empty the contents inside the bowl through a downward motion into the drain pipe. In the flush cycle, water comes into forceful contact with the contents inside the bowl and creates a fine spray of particles suspended in air.

We found that a typical commercial toilet generates a strong upward jet of air with velocities exceeding 6.6 feet per second (2 meters per second), rapidly carrying these particles up to 5 feet (1.5 meters) above the bowl within eight seconds of the start of th… Read More

The AC-130 is one of the US military’s most capable aircraft. Ground troops love the gunship and the capabilities it brings to the fight, but it can be effective even without deploying its large arsenal. During the chaotic evacuation of Kabul, Afghanistan, in August 2021, two AC-130J Ghostrider crews used a little-known laser sensor on their planes to help control the situation around the airport and keep enemy forces at bay as friendly troops carried out the e… Read More

At a range in southern England, researchers tested a new laser, making it one step closer to military use. Developed for the Ministry of Defence, DragonFire is intended to be a long-range answer to incoming threats, a way to defeat projectiles in mid-air through the concentrated power of intense light. On November 8, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) announced it had conducted long-range laser trials at the Porton Down site. During the live fire test, the laser hit and neutralized a small drone at a range o… Read More

In an effort to learn more about the effects of drugs on the brain and develop treatments for neurodegenerative conditions like epilepsy and dementia, scientists have grown human and mouse brain cells on a microelectrode array in a Petri dish. This living model, layered with 800,000 living brain cells, is currently playing the classic Atari video game ‘Pong.’ Next, the scientists plan to get the… Read More

Scientists are breaking optical data transmission records at record pace (see what I did there). The newest transmission record is quite staggering. Average broadband download speeds in the US come in at around 167 megabits per second. This new optical data transfer record multiplies that rate by approximately… 10.8 million… Read More

Controlling insect pests still relies on the extensive usage of generic and established methods, such as pesticides, which utilize broad spectrum chemicals or toxins persisting in the environment and targeting non-pest insect species. Therefore, more effective and environmental friendly approaches are needed to counteract these damagin… Read More

Physicists at the Australian National University say that optical microscopes should get a huge boost in magnification, after their discovery of a new high harmonic laser illumination technique, using a tiny cylinder 1/50th the width of a h… Read More

“One of the most fascinating predictions of quantum mechanics is entanglement, where widely separated particles can be prepared so that they behave as a single unit,” Ulf Danielsson, secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physics, tells Popular Mechanics. “The groundbreaking experiments of Clauser, Aspect, and Zeilinger show that this mind-boggling phenomenon persists at macroscopic distances, demonstrating the deficiency of our classical int… Read More

Called ZEUS, the Zetawatt-Equivalent Ultrashort pulse laser System, it will explore the physics of the quantum universe as well as outer space, and it is expected to contribute to new technologies in medicine, electronics and national… Read More

Lockheed Martin has delivered its most powerful laser to date to the US military’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research & Engineering OUSD (R&E) ahead of schedule for installation in new laser weapon demonstrators designed to engage a variety o… Read More

When squeezed to about a million times Earth’s atmospheric pressure and heated to thousands of degrees Celsius, polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, forms nanodiamonds, physicist Dominik Kraus and colleagues report September 2 in Science… Read More

For the first time, astronomers have used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to take a direct image of a planet outside our solar system. The exoplanet is a gas giant, meaning it has no rocky surface and could not be … Read More

Imagine walking into an airport or grocery store and your smartphone automatically starts charging. This could be a reality one day, thanks to a new wireless laser charging system that overcomes some of the challenges that have hindered previous attempts to develop safe and convenient on-the-go chargin… Read More

Finding water on the moon could be easier with a Goddard technology that uses an effect called quantum tunneling to generate a high-powered terahertz laser, filling a gap in existing laser t… Read More

Laser communications systems provide missions with increased data rates, meaning they can send and receive more information in a single transmission compared to traditional radio waves. Additionally, the systems are lighter, more flexible, and more secure. Laser communications can supplement radio frequency communications, which most NASA missions us… Read More

Researchers have developed a new chip-based beam steering technology that provides a promising route to small, cost-effective and high-performance lidar (or light detection and ranging… Read More

On the day of the tremor, Giuseppe Marra, a principal research scientist at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, England, was running an experiment that beamed an ultra-stable laser through underground fibre-optic cables. It was part of a larger effort to build one of the world’s most accurate clocks, capable of measuring time to the nearest quintillionth of a second. Almost a thousand miles away from his native Italy, Marra did not feel the quake, but he heard about it on the news. The next morning, he walked to work to review the results of his e… Read More

With faster speeds and the ability to run multiple algorithms at one time, quantum computers will be able to help solve some of the biggest technological issues our society faces. Because quantum computers rely on what are called qubits–atoms that possess a nuclear magnetic spin level that is manipulated in order to achieve the qubit state–unique things occasionally happen within thes… Read More

Bringing Mars samples to Earth would allow scientists across the world to examine the specimens using sophisticated instruments too large and too complex to send to Mars and would enable future generations to study them. Curating the samples on Earth would also allow the science community to test new theories and models as they are developed, much as the Apollo samples returned from the Moon have done fo… Read More

Early data from the James Webb Space Telescope is already starting to come in, with exciting finds like views of Jupiter and a potential sighting of the most distant galaxy ever observed. But there’s a lot more Webb data being shared, and much of it is publicly available through the Space Telescope Science Institute’s MAST archive. That means enterprising astronomers are already digging through James Webb data to perform their own analyses, and have created some amazin… Read More

Researchers have shown that a quantum-inspired technique can be used to perform LiDAR imaging with a much higher depth resolution than is possible with conventional approaches. LiDAR, which uses laser pulses to acquire 3D information about a scene or object, is usually best suited for imaging large objects such as topographical features or built structures due to its limited depth res… Read More

A team of physicists from the University of Amsterdam has now managed to solve the difficult problem of creating a continuous Bose-Einstein Condensate. Florian Schreck, the team leader, explains what the trick was. “In previous experiments, the gradual cooling of atoms was all done in one place. In our setup, we decided to spread the cooling steps not over time, but in space: we make th… Read More

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have uncovered critical new details about fusion facilities that use lasers to compress the fuel that produces fusion energy. The new data could help lead to the improved design of future laser facilities that harness the fusion process that drives the sun an… Read More