Optics

Three NASA scientists teamed up to develop and demonstrate NASA's first wide field-of-view soft X-ray camera for studying "charge exchange," a poorly understood phenomenon that occurs when the solar wind collides with Earth's exosphere and neutral gas in interplanetary space.

Drawing heavily upon nature for inspiration, a team of researchers has created a new artificial lens that is nearly identical to the natural lens of the human eye. This innovative lens, which is made up of thousands of nanoscale polymer layers, may one day provide a more natural performance in implantable...

University of Illinois researchers have a new low-cost method to carve delicate features onto semiconductor wafers using light – and watch as it happens. The team’s new technique can monitor a semiconductor’s surface as it is etched, in real time, with nanometer resolution. It uses...

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. At 60 nanometers thick, the flat lens is essentially two-dimensional, yet its focusing power...

Researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), collaborating with the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, have now demonstrated a drastically new way of achieving negative refraction in a metamaterial.The primary advantages of the new technology...

This software retrieves the surface and atmosphere parameters of multi-angle, multiband spectra. The synthetic spectra are generated by applying the modified Rahman-Pinty-Verstraete Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) model, and a single-scattering...

This software is designed to predict large active mirror performance at various stages in the fabrication lifecycle of the mirror. It was developed for 1-meter class powered mirrors for astronomical purposes, but is extensible to other geometries. The package accepts finite...

Theodolites are a common instrument in the testing, alignment, and building of various systems ranging from a single optical component to an entire instrument. They provide a precise way to measure horizontal and vertical angles. They can be used to align multiple objects in a desired way...

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has found what astronomers believe to be the most distant object ever seen in the universe, 13.2 billion light years away. This places the object roughly 150 million light years more distant than the previous record holder. The dim object is a compact galaxy made of blue stars that...

The fabrication of large optics is traditionally a slow process, and fabrication capability is often limited by measurement capability. While techniques exist to measure mirror figure with nanometer precision,...

There may be some new movies coming out in 3-D, and no, I'm not talking about a Yogi Bear sequel. A new live-cell microscope invented by scientists at Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus lets researchers use a thin sheet of light to reveal three-dimensional shapes of cellular landmarks....

Software called Micropilot may help researchers struggling to pinpoint particular cells in their microscopes. The technology, developed by European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) scientists, searches for cells with specific features. After detecting the cells that a researcher is interested in, the...