In a recent article, I looked at the demise of Lytro, maker of the first consumer “light field” camera, and what it meant for the future of this technology in mobile devices. As intriguing as some of ...

Scientists used a new invariant property of vectorial light to encode information. This quantity, which the team call 'vectorness', scales from 0 to 1 and remains unchanged when passing through a ...

Photonics researchers have demonstrated how self-imaging of light, a phenomenon known for nearly two centuries, can be applied to cylindrical systems, facilitating unprecedented control of light's ...

After futzing around with a cheap pico projector, a webcam and a little bit of software, [Jas Strong] built herself a 3d scanner. In spite of the dozens of Kinect-based scanner projects, we’ve seen ...

The speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 m s –1, right? Not necessarily, according to a team of physicists in the UK, which has found that the speed of an individual photon decreases by a tiny ...

Structured light waves with spiral phase fronts carry orbital angular momentum (OAM), attributed to the rotational motion of photons. Recently, scientists have been using light waves with OAM, and ...

Structured light can significantly enhance information capacity, due to its coupling of spatial dimensions and multiple degrees of freedom. In recent years, the combination of structured light ...

Structured Illumination Microscopy (SIM) is a tool which breaks the diffraction resolution barrier to provide resolutions of up to 20nm. The resolution of conventional microscopes is limited by the ...

Researchers from the School of Physics at Wits University, working with collaborators from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, have demonstrated how quantum light can be engineered in space and ...

Light doesn’t always travel at the speed of light. A new experiment reveals that focusing or manipulating the structure of light pulses reduces their speed, even in vacuum conditions. A paper ...