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(PhysOrg.com) -- The human eye is as comfortable with white light generated by diode lasers as with that produced by increasingly popular light-emitting diodes (LEDs), according to tests conceived at Sandia National Laboratories.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) at its most recent meeting in Sčvres, France, has voted unanimously on a proposal to consider changes to at least some of the seven basic units (second, metre, kilogram, ampere, kelvin, mole and candela) of measurements used by most of the civilized world. This comes after years of debate concerning the kilogram, ampere, kelvin, and mole in particular. Of these, the kilogram has come under the most fire as it’s still based on a hunk of metal kept under lock and key in a vault in Paris.

(PhysOrg.com) -- If quantum computers are ever to be realized, they likely will be made of different types of parts that will need to share information with one another, just like the memory and logic circuits in today's computers do. However, prospects for achieving this kind of communication seemed distant -- until now. A team of physicists working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has shown for the first time how these parts might communicate effectively.

Laser frequency combs -- extraordinarily precise tools for measuring frequencies (or colors) of light -- have helped propel advances in timekeeping, trace gas detection and related physics research to new heights in the past decade.

Just as a corset improves the appearance of its wearer by keeping everything tightly together, rigidly constraining insulating materials in electrical components can increase their energy density and decrease their rates of failure.

Part of managing diabetes involves piercing a finger several times daily to monitor blood sugar levels.

With the click of a computer mouse, a scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) sends 10,000 volts of electricity into a chamber filled with hydrogen gas.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Taking light control to a new level, scientists have proposed a technique for confining light into an area just 1/500th the size of the light's wavelength. Since funneling light through such tiny spaces enhances the optical fields and increases the light's transmission, it could lead to a variety of new optical applications.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Cornell scientists have surpassed two major scientific milestones toward proving the technology of a novel, exceedingly powerful X-ray source.

A team of physicists headed by Prof.

The heat which occurs in tiny computer processors might soon be no longer useless or even a problem. On the contrary: It could be used to switch these processors more easily or to store data more efficiently! These are two of the several potential applications made possible by a discovery made at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB). This so-called "thermoelectric voltage" may well be very interesting – mainly for the use of nano-junctions, i.e.

When doping a disordered magnetic insulator material with atoms of a nonmagnetic material, the conventional wisdom is that the magnetic interactions between the magnetic ions in the material will be weakened.

Help to unravel the mysteries of the Universe! With the SixTrack project developed by EPFL, your computer can provide CERN with additional computing power.

(PhysOrg.com) -- In this 100th anniversary year of the discovery of superconductivity, physicists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology have published a fully self-consistent theory of the new kind of superconducting behavior, Type 1.5, this month in the journal Physical Review B.

Tiny particles are making a big difference in the world of cancer therapy. And SLAC physicists—experts in particle transport—are using computer simulations to make those therapies safer.