A closed door feels absolute. Light stays in one room, darkness settles in the next, and the boundary seems obvious enough to ...

Invisible infrared waves are emitted by IR LEDs and detected by photodiodes to enable devices like remotes, automatic ...

Quantum physics is the realm of the strange. And one of the strangest discoveries in the field is also one of the most fundamental: Particles fired at barriers with two slits in them can act like ...

Two of the forefathers of quantum theory, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, had a famous argument over whether light is a wave or a particle. Columnist Karmela Padavic-Callaghan finds that the matter ha ...

Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, with collaborators from MIT, Harvard, and Stanford, have experimentally confirmed a 1970s prediction that 'dark points'—optical vortices in ...

Scientists have directly observed optical vortices—'dark points' in light waves—moving faster than light for the first time, confirming a long-standing prediction. The phenomenon does not violate ...

(Aitor Diago/Moment/Getty Images) For the first time, physicists have observed that 'holes' in light can move faster than the light itself. They're known as phase singularities or optical vortices, ...

For the first time, researchers measured singularities in combined light and sound waves moving faster than the speed of ...

University of Illinois Physics Professor Paul Kwiat and members of his research group have developed a new tool for precision measurement at the nanometer scale in scenarios where background noise and ...

Plasma, the fourth state of matter, consists of a gas in which electrons are no longer bound to atoms, which allows ...

Can we turn back time? Ask a savvy physicist, and the answer will be “it depends.” Schemes for retrograde time travel abound but usually involve irreconcilable paradoxes and rely on outlandish ...

Scientists experimentally confirmed what we’ve known to be true for half a century—darkness can “travel” faster than light.