Place a chunk of the clear mineral Iceland spar on top of an image and suddenly you'll see double, thanks to a phenomenon called double refraction—a result of a quality of the crystal material called optical anisotropy. ...
Stimuli-sensitive materials can respond to physical forces with structural phase transitions. This also applies to biopolymer–surfactant mixtures, a study by German and Chinese scientists now reports. Surprisingly, the ...
To get the extremely high-resolution images vital to study new materials, microbes, and more, scientists often build microscopes based on optical vortices. Forming these tiny tornadoes of light is done using quartz or liquid ...
Ceramic, a kind of poly-crystalline monolith sintered by inorganic, non-metallic crystallites, is normally opaque due to defects, voids and birefringence. Eliminating the inner light scatter creates transparent or optical ...
Vector polarizers are a light filtering technology hidden behind the operation of many optical systems. They can be found, for instance, in sunglasses, LCD screens, microscopes, microprocessors, laser machining and more. ...
A team of researchers led by Assistant Professor Yuki Arakawa, Toyohashi University of Technology, has successfully liquid crystallized π-conjugated rod-like molecules with alkylthio groups containing sulfur, and developed ...
Berry curvature may not be the most well-known scientific concept, but to many physicists, its direct measurement is something akin to a holy grail.
A large international collaboration has used a specialised technique on the infrared microspectroscopy (IRM) beamline at the Australian Synchrotron to determine the structure of proteins in individual silk fibres that has ...
Glass is everywhere. Whether someone is gazing out a window or scrolling through a smartphone, odds are that there is a layer of glass between them and whatever it is they're looking at.
Chemists at the Lomonosov Moscow State University, in collaboration with Czech partners, have synthesized and studied new liquid-crystal photochromic polymers. These polymers combine optical properties of liquid crystals ...
