Scientists have advanced metasurface technology by developing a new design that simultaneously projects holographic images and creates special diffraction patterns with ten-fold rotation symmetry of ...

I learned in October 2022’s Breakthrough that the spikes of stars in high-power photos are called diffraction spikes. Why do they appear as two crosses at 45 degrees to each other? The diffraction ...

A rainbow reveals with colors what otherwise remains hidden: light is "refracted" by transparent matter, in this case water droplets. This same physical effect underlies many everyday technologies, ...

The famous double-slit experiment, which demonstrated that light is both a wave and a particle, has been performed using “slits in time”. The techniques involved present a new way to manipulate light ...