Imagine a proton catching a wave and surfing it to gain speed. While the imagery may seem wild, the premise of laser-driven ...

In day-to-day life, light seems intangible. We walk through it and create and extinguish it with the flip of a switch. But, like matter, light actually carries a little punch—it has momentum. Light ...

Magnetic reconnection is a process that occurs when the magnetic fields of a conductive plasma quickly rearrange and release massive amounts of stored magnetic energy. It is widely thought to be the ...

For the first time, a quantum radiation reaction in strong electromagnetic fields has been demonstrated experimentally by allowing electrons to collide with an extremely intense and powerful laser ...

New analysis uses neutron-free shots to estimate 100–100,000 neutrons per laser pulse in deuterium cluster fusion ...

Experts at the BELLA Center used dual laser beams focused onto a sheet of gas to reach a milestone energy in laser-driven electron acceleration. Four members of the larger team gathered with the ...

Dozens of times over the last decade NASA scientists have launched laser beams at a reflector the size of a paperback novel about 240,000 miles (385,000 kilometers) away from Earth. They announced ...

Newswise — Experiments at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) require breathtaking precision. Each of the 192 lasers is focused to a width of a few millimeters to ...

The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to innovators in laser physics responsible for optical tweezers and high-intensity, ultrashort optical pulses. Stretchy genes. Half of the 2018 physics Nobel Prize ...

Starting with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on October 5, the Physics and Chemistry prizes will be announced on ...