Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about physics, science, academia, and pop culture. There's an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which John de ...

University of Illinois Physics Professor Paul Kwiat and members of his research group have developed a new tool for precision measurement at the nanometer scale in scenarios where background noise and ...

Researchers from the School of Physics at Wits University, working with collaborators from the Universitat Autònoma de ...

Physicists from Imperial College London have achieved a groundbreaking milestone in quantum physics by reimagining the ...

Technologies that rely on interactions between matter and polarized light usually stick to the well-understood effects of linear or circular polarization. Researchers at Rice University in the US have ...

AMES, Iowa – Scientists are using light waves to accelerate supercurrents and access the unique properties of the quantum world, including forbidden light emissions that one day could be applied to ...

Scientists have used a new method to determine the characteristics of optical, i.e. light-based, quantum states. For the first time, they are using certain photon detectors -- devices that can detect ...

Optics and photonics are central to many aspects of our lives. Refraction, emission and absorption of light within materials govern imaging, sensing, lighting and communications. However, many of ...

A career in optical physics or engineering means knowing about the behavior and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and its detection by instruments. Since the discovery that ...

Physicists have chased a unified description of nature for more than a century, yet quantum theory and gravity have ...

Light is well known to exhibit both wave-like and particle-like properties, as imaged here in this 2015 photograph. What's less well appreciated is that matter particles also exhibit those wave-like ...