vacuum

3 posts

How do you study a laser firing for one-quadrillionth of a second?

7 min read
Scicomm attophysics attosecond laser attosecond streaking band gap boxcar integrator carrier wave carrier-envelope phase carrier-envelope phase offset chirped pulse amplification circular polarisation conduction band dielectrics electric field femtochemistry femtosecond laser magnetic field Maxwell's equations pulse train time of flight spectroscopy vacuum valence band

I'm grateful to Mukund Thattai, at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru, for explaining many of the basic concepts at work in the following article. An important application of…

Where is the coolest lab in the universe?

5 min read
Scicomm blue hypergiant Boomerang Nebula Bose-Einstein condensate cosmic microwave background energy density Eta Carinae gas outflow heat International Space Station kinetic energy Large Hadron Collider Nature News red giant temperature thermal equilibrium thermodynamics vacuum Vladivostok white dwarf Wolfgang Ketterle

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) performs an impressive feat every time it accelerates billions of protons to nearly the speed of light – and not in terms of the energy alone. For example, you release…