Featured series 
Tag: light
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Nation & World
Seeing things in a different light
Harvard researchers are using a chemical process known as triplet fusion upconversion to transform near-infrared photons into high-energy photons. The high-energy photons could be used in a huge range of applications, including a new type of precisely targeted chemotherapy, in which low-energy infrared lasers that penetrate deep into the body could be used to transform…
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Nation & World
Nobel physics laureate Roy Glauber dies at 93
Roy Glauber, the pioneering theoretical physicist who received the 2005 Nobel Prize in physics, died on Dec. 26. He was 93.
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Nation & World
Seeing light in a new way
Working with colleagues at the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms, Professor of Physics Mikhail Lukin and post-doctoral fellow Ofer Firstenberg have managed to coax photons into binding together to form molecules — a state of matter that, until recently, had been purely theoretical.
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Nation & World
Pickles, prisms, and scientists
Celebrating its 11th year of public engagement, the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences’ (SEAS) Holiday Lecture Series dazzled and delighted audiences on Dec. 8 with a show guaranteed to kindle curiosity about the natural world.
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Nation & World
Needle beam stays on point
A Harvard-led team of researchers has demonstrated a new type of light beam that propagates without spreading outward, remaining very narrow and controlled along an unprecedented distance. It could greatly reduce signal loss for on-chip optical systems and may eventually assist the development of a more powerful class of microprocessors.
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Nation & World
Perfecting optics
Applied physicists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have created an ultrathin, flat lens that focuses light without imparting the distortions of conventional lenses.
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Nation & World
From a flat mirror, designer light
Using a new technique, researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have induced light rays to behave in a way that defies the centuries-old laws of reflection and refraction.
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Nation & World
A living laser
In a new report, Harvard researchers Malte Gather and Seok-Hyun Yun describe how a single cell genetically engineered to express green fluorescent protein can be used to amplify the light particles called photons into nanosecond-long pulses of laser light.
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Nation & World
Prof. Lene Hau: Light matters
In 2007, Professor Hau expanded upon her ’05 light-stopping breakthrough by transforming light into matter, and then back again.
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Nation & World
There’s more to the North Star than meets the eye
We tend to think of the North Star, Polaris, as a steady, solitary point of light that guided sailors in ages past. But there is more to the North Star…
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Nation & World
Robotic telescope penetrates heart of universe’s most powerful explosion
Cullen Blake, a graduate student at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and lead author on the paper, said that the simultaneous observation of infrared light with a gamma-ray burst was…
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Nation & World
Have light, will not travel
Harvard researchers fired a short signal pulse of red laser light into a sealed glass cylinder containing a hot gas of rubidium atoms illuminated by a strong control beam. While…
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Nation & World
Light propagates via wires more slender than its own wavelength
A research team led by Harvard’s Eric Mazur and Limin Tong, a visiting professor from Zhejiang University in China, reported on their work with nanowires in the Dec. 18, 2003…
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Nation & World
Blue light special
Jet-setters and shift workers now sit in front of glaring white lights to readjust their body rhythms and avoid sleep and alertness problems. New experiments condcuted by Harvard University researchers…
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Nation & World
New, far-out planet is discovered
A planet discovered in the constellation Sagittarius is so distant that light takes 5,000 years to travel from there to here at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. Called…
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Nation & World
Harvard researchers stop, restart, light
Albert Einstein theorized that light cannot travel faster than 186,282 miles per second. But he never said it couldn’t go slower. Lene Hau, a physics professor in the Faculty of…
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Nation & World
Treating advanced lung cancer with light
Photodynamic, or light, therapy was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in December 1998. The FDA has also approved using lasers for treatment of advanced stages of cancer of…
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Nation & World
Light weapons are most common in today’s small wars
In the 1990s, approximately 4 million soldiers and civilians were killed by small arms in the internecine conflicts of the developing world. More people, in other words, were killed in…
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Nation & World
Physicists Slow Speed of Light
Light, which normally travels the 240,000 miles from the Moon to Earth in less than two seconds, has been slowed to the speed of a minivan in rush-hour traffic —…