Tag Archives: vacuum

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

Posted on November 3, 2020 by

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 lasers today is in the form of extremely short-lived laser … Continue reading →

Posted in Scicomm | Tagged 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 | Comments Off

Where is the coolest lab in the universe?

Posted on June 18, 2020 by

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 more energy when you clap … Continue reading →

Posted in Scicomm | Tagged 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 | Comments Off

Good writing is an atom

Posted on September 20, 2019 by

The act of writing well is like an atom, or the universe. There is matter but it is thinly distributed, with lots of empty space in between. Removing this seeming nothingness won’t help, however. Its presence is necessary for things … Continue reading →

Posted in Life notes, Scicomm | Tagged dark energy, electrons, galaxy, good writing, Hubble constant, neutrons, protons, science journalism, science writing, universe, vacuum, vacuum energy, void | Comments Off