When one of Hye-Sook Park’s experiments goes well, everyone nearby knows. “We can hear Hye-Sook screaming,” she’s heard colleagues say. It’s no surprise that she can’t contain her excitement. She’s ...

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility (NIF) is the hottest place on Earth for the briefest of moments during an experiment. Now, it can be one of the brightest places ...

What occurs when you subject a metal renowned for its stability, blast it with a laser pulse only 45 femtoseconds in duration, and heat it to 19,000 kelvins but it won’t melt? Physicists had long ...

A new experiment has demonstrated something that sounds physically impossible – light itself casting a shadow. It turns out that if you manipulate a laser just right, then hit it side-on with another ...

For the first time, physicists have used lasers to deep-freeze antimatter. In a new experiment, an ultraviolet laser quelled the thermal jitters of antihydrogen atoms, chilling the antiatoms to just ...

Physicists are no longer content to simply listen to ripples in spacetime. A new proposal sketches out how an exquisitely tuned laser experiment could, in principle, nudge gravitational waves ...

Back in 2000, a team of physicists led by Lijun Wang at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, USA, pulled off a mind-bending experiment. They fired a precisely shaped laser pulse through a special ...

In a few picoseconds (trillionths of a second), a small, thin piece of copper momentarily becomes dense plasma, specifically a state called warm dense matter, warm being a relative term – the metal is ...

Scientists from the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) have demonstrated what they call an effective “spark plug” for direct-drive methods of inertial confinement fusion ...