Seeing the invisible: A real life Eye of Sauron?

“That’s the idea here: an all-seeing eye that can detect hazardous aerosols against a very crowded background of other substances”

05-Apr-2024 - Picture this disaster scenario in the making: At an industrial plant, a pipe cracks, spraying a cloud of tiny droplets into the air. Workers, however, are in luck. Within minutes, a laser-based device the size of a small suitcase spots the cloud and tells safety crews what’s in it so they know ...

Point of light

Caltech engineers invent light-focusing device that may lead to applications in computing, communications, and imaging

13-Dec-2012 - As technology advances, it tends to shrink. From cell phones to laptops - powered by increasingly faster and tinier processors - everything is getting thinner and sleeker. And now light beams are getting smaller, too. Engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have created a ...

Caltech scientists use high-pressure 'alchemy' to create nonexpanding metals

22-Jun-2009 - By squeezing a typical metal alloy at pressures hundreds of thousands of times greater than normal atmospheric pressure, scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have created a material that does not expand when heated, as does nearly every normal metal, and acts like a ...

Plasmonic whispering gallery microcavity paves the way to future nanolasers

27-Jan-2009 - The principle behind whispering galleries – where words spoken softly beneath a domed ceiling or in a vault can be clearly heard on the opposite side of the chamber – has been used to achieve what could prove to be a significant breakthrough in the miniaturization of lasers. Ultrasmall lasers, ...

Argonne researcher studies what makes quantum dots blink

08-Oct-2007 - In order to learn more about the origins of quantum dot blinking, researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Chicago and the California Institute of Technology have developed a method to characterize it on faster time scales than have ...