Tag Archives: S Pancharatnam

A laser to make light of many shapes

Posted on July 17, 2025 by

Lasers can produce a slender beam of light of just one wavelength. For this simple feature, they are everywhere in modern technology, from the internet to medical devices and even in entertainment as holograms. However, traditional lasers have some limitations. … Continue reading →

Posted in Scicomm | Tagged gain medium, George Series, laser, laser wavefront, meta-atoms, metalaser, metasurface, Michael Berry, S Pancharatnam | Comments Off

A fountainhead of intrigue

Posted on November 24, 2022 by

Recently, a Chinese-American mathematician named Yitang Zhang claimed to have resolved the Landau-Siegel zeroes conjecture, which is related to the Riemann hypothesis. (Specifically, disproving the conjecture brings us a small stop closer to proving the Riemann hypothesis.) His paper hasn’t … Continue reading →

Posted in Scicomm | Tagged Barry Cipra, Bernhard Riemann, Brian Hayes, Michael Berry, nontrivial zeroes, random Hermitian matrix, Riemann hypothesis, Riemann zeta function, S Pancharatnam | Comments Off

When cooling down really means slowing down

Posted on May 5, 2020 by

Consider this post the latest in a loosely defined series about atomic cooling techniques that I’ve been writing since June 2018. Atoms can’t run a temperature, but things made up of atoms, like a chair or table, can become hotter … Continue reading →

Posted in Scicomm | Tagged Albert Einstein, atomic cooling, atomic trap, Bose-Einstein condensate, Bose-Einstein statistics, Carl Wieman, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, collisional cooling, diatomic molecules, Eric Cornell, Harvard University, laser cooling, Massachusetts Institute of Technoogy, NaLi, niobium nitride, quantum chemistry, quantum computing, S Pancharatnam, Satyendra Nath Bose, Shivaramakrishnan Pancharatnam, Sisyphus cooling, spin polarization, superconductors, superfluids, University of Waterloo, Wolfgang Ketterle | Comments Off