Donna Strickland: Life in the (ultra)fast lane

Matt Yeh is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Applied Physics program at Harvard University. He is interested in studying how light-matter interaction can be used for quantum information science. Jovana Andrejevic is a fifth-year Applied Physics Ph.D. student in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. Cover image by Media Design and Media Publishing from Pixabay. This biography is part of … Continue reading Donna Strickland: Life in the (ultra)fast lane

Donna Strickland: Life in the (ultra)fast lane

by Matthew Yeh Ever wondered how laser eye surgery can be so precise, or how scientists can study processes that unravel over a billionth of a billionth of a second? Donna Strickland has got you covered! While a PhD student at the University of Rochester, she developed the technique of chirped pulse amplification (CPA), thus enabling the creation of ultra-short, high-intensity laser pulses. Beyond LASIK, … Continue reading Donna Strickland: Life in the (ultra)fast lane

Sticky Light: Physicists discover new Photon Interactions

Light is made of little particles called photons that usually don’t interact. Imagine how strange it would be if the light from your window ricocheted off the light from computer screen! Our brains couldn’t make sense of these images and we’d be stuck in a blurry—albeit bright—world. Professors Vladan Vuletic and Mikhail Lukin, at MIT have made this mindbender a reality. By shining a weak laser … Continue reading Sticky Light: Physicists discover new Photon Interactions

A Freeway for Light: Topology Protects Lasers from Defects

If you want to admire the beauty behind the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics – topological phases of matter, take a course in topology, followed by graduate-level solid state physics. But if you ask for a concrete application of this topic, you now have an excellent example. Harnessing the concept of topology, scientists have engineered a new way to channel light in lasers. Originally a … Continue reading A Freeway for Light: Topology Protects Lasers from Defects

The Chemical Structure of DNA

New route to the origin of life? Probably not.

From Scientists recreate what may be life’s first spark How did life originate? This puzzle has been studied by scientists for hundreds of years. Authors of a >new paper in PNAS claim to have found a clue: they bombarded a chemical (formamide) found on the earth around the time life arose with high energy laser to simulate a meteor impact. They then looked for and … Continue reading New route to the origin of life? Probably not.