Although most people are probably familiar with the different energy levels that the electron shells of atoms can be in and how electrons shedding excess energy as they return to a lower state emit ...

Researchers at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology have built a compact laser system that suppresses frequency noise by more than 140 decibels, a performance level that could ...

For the first time, the state of an atomic nucleus was switched with a laser. For decades, physicists have been looking for such a nuclear transition -- now it has been found. This opens up a new ...

For experiments that require ultra-precise measurements and control over atoms -- think two-photon atomic clocks, cold-atom interferometer sensors and quantum gates -- lasers are the technology of ...

Physicists at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), a collaboration of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland-College Park, have for the first time ...

Jun Wu, Minxue Tang, Lingrong Zhao, Pengfei Zhu, Tao Jiang, Xiao Zou, Liang Hong, Sheng-Nian Luo, Dao Xiang, Jie Zhang Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. An award-winning reporter writing about stargazing and the night sky. Two cutting-edge atomic clocks — the most accurate ever ...

If you think about it, an antenna is nothing more than a radio frequency energy sensor, or — more precisely — a transducer. So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that there could be different ways to sense ...

Physicists at JILA, a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado at Boulder, have demonstrated a powerful new technique that reveals ...

Pulsed laser deposition (PLD) involves a laser ablation procedure, where a laser pulse interacts with a material surface to induce the formation of a plasma plume that expands away from the surface.