Optics news from across the web

(Georgia Institute of Technology Research News) Researchers can now measure a laser's power and spatial energy distribution at once by directing the beam onto a reusable glass target board GTRI designed. The new system will accelerate high-energy laser development and reduce the time required to make them operational for national security purposes.(author unknown)

(American Institute of Physics) The basis for solar energy is absorbing light and then effectively disassociating electrical charges. University of Cambridge researchers report in the journal Applied Physics Letters that conjugated polymers are excellent materials for such a system, thanks to their light absorption and conduction properties.(author unknown)

Currently, new treatment facilities for radiation therapy with ions are built all over the world. These particles destroy cancer cells and have a better ability to spare the surrounding healthy tissue than other techniques. Today, accelerated hydrogen and carbon ions are mainly used to treat inoperable tumors in organs like the brain and bone marrow, which are sensitive to radiation therapy. A new technology for this kind of treatment is developed by researchers of the OncoRay center in Dresden and of the research center Forschungszentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (FZD): in their concept the ion beams are accelerated by a compactlaser, and not in ‘normal’ accelerators. They published their first results of cell irradiations using ions in the “New Journal of Physics“.(author unknown)

(American Institute of Physics) A new optical imaging technique described in the journal Review of Scientific Instruments holds the potential to greatly improve angioplasty, a surgery commonly performed to treat patients with a partially or completely blocked coronary artery that restricts blood flow to the heart.(author unknown)

(University of Leicester) Norwegian company EnSol AS to develop unique patented technology in collaboration with University of Leicester.(author unknown)

Green laser pointers have become a popular consumer item, delivering light that's brighter to the eye than red lasers, but stories have circulated on the Web about the potential hazards of inexpensive models. Now, a team at NIST has found that in some cases green laser pointers emit high levels of invisible and potentially dangerous infrared light.

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(University of Arizona) A team of astronomers at the University of Arizona has developed a technique that allows them to switch off star twinkling over a wide field of view, enabling Earth-based telescopes to obtain images as crisp as those taken with the Hubble Space Telescope -- and much more quickly.(author unknown)

(American Institute of Physics) By embedding the element selenium in zinc oxide, a team at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California has made a relatively inexpensive material that could be promising for solar power conversion by making more efficient use of the sun's energy. They describe their work in the journal Applied Physics Letters.(author unknown)

(American Institute of Physics) One of the most promising technologies for making inexpensive but reasonably efficient photovoltaic cells just got much cheaper. Scientists in Canada have shown that inexpensive nickel can work just as well as gold for one of the critical electrical contacts that gather the electrical current produced by colloidal quantum dot solar cells.(author unknown)

(Stanford University) A new process that simultaneously combines the light and heat of solar radiation to generate electricity could offer more than double the efficiency of existing solar cell technology, say the Stanford engineers who discovered it and proved that it works. The process, called 'photon enhanced thermionic emission," or PETE, could reduce the costs of solar energy production enough for it to compete with oil as an energy source.(author unknown)

(Northwestern University) One Chicago skyline is dazzling enough. Now imagine 15,000 of them. Northwestern University researchers have done just that -- drawing 15,000 identical skylines with tiny beams of light using an innovative nanofabrication technology called beam-pen lithography. BPL uses an array of pens made of a polymer to print patterns over large areas with nanoscopic through macroscopic resolution. The method could do for nanofabrication what the desktop printer has done for printing and information transfer.(author unknown)

(University of Rochester) A new membrane developed at the University of Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics blocks gas from flowing through it when one color of light is shined on its surface, and permits gas to flow through when another color of light is used. It is the first time that scientists have developed a membrane that can be controlled in this way by light.(author unknown)

(National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (UK)) Scientists in Southampton, UK, and Ulm and Karlsruhe in Germany have shown that a variant form of a fluorescent protein originally isolated from a reef coral has excellent properties as a marker protein for super-resolution microscopy in live cells. Their findings have been published online by Nature Methods and will appear in print in the upcoming August issue of that journal.(author unknown)

(Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) Quantum cryptography is the safest way to encrypt data. It utilizes the fact that transmitted information can only be measured with a strictly limited degree of precision. Scientists at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich and ETH Zürich have now discovered how the use of a quantum memory affects this uncertainty.(author unknown)

(University of Southern California) A University of Southern California team has produced flexible transparent carbon atom films that the researchers say have great potential for a new breed of solar cells.(author unknown)

(American Institute of Physics) Recently, academic debate has been swirling around the existence of unusual quantum mechanical effects in the most ubiquitous of phenomena, including photosynthesis, the process by which organisms convert light into chemical energy. In a paper in The Journal of Chemical Physics, these ideas are put to the test.(author unknown)

(Michigan Technological University) From Star Trek's Romulans, who could cloak their spaceships, to Harry Potter's magical garment, the power to turn someone or something invisible has intrigued mankind. Now a Michigan Tech researcher is doing it for real.(author unknown)

The explorer's terrible health and vehement opposition to slavery are clear in letters enhanced by multispectral imaging

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Imagine printing your own room lighting, lasers, or solar cells from inks you buy at the local newsagent. Jacek Jasieniak and his colleagues at CSIRO, the University of Melbourne and the University of Padua in Italy, have moved a step closer to such a future, by developing liquid inks based on quantum dots that can be used to print devices.(author unknown)04911930513344867207

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory have developed new laser-machining techniques for radiation detectors. "The new detectors will enable the next generation of space-based high-energy radiation astronomical research and might also be used for homeland security applications," explains Dr. Bernard Phlips, who heads the NRL team.(author unknown)