A team of researchers at the California Institute of Technology devised a means of measuring the thin membranes of a lightsail, helping prove out a futuristic travel concept first imagined by ...

"The lightsail will travel faster than any previous spacecraft, with potential to eventually open interstellar distances to direct spacecraft exploration." Scientists at the California Institute ...

But a higher-energy version of this phenomenon could use a ground- or space-based laser beam to push a lightsail on a spacecraft in a more directed way. With the beam providing a source of ...

The emergence of imaging schemes capable of overcoming Abbe's diffraction barrier is revolutionizing optical microscopy. In 1873, the German physicist Ernst Abbe realized that the resolution of ...

A team of scientists has made the first experimental measurements of laser-induced motions of miniature lightsails in the lab. The idea of traveling through interstellar space using spacecraft ...

In two recent studies published in Nature Communications and Science Advances, Antonio Ambrosio and his team at the Center for Nano Science and Technology (CNST) at IIT Milan introduced a new ...

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is known for looking deep into the universe with an unprecedented level precision and sensitivity. But its images aren't only scientifically useful — they're ...

But building and testing these sails is a complex undertaking. “The lightsail will travel faster than any previous spacecraft, with potential to eventually open interstellar distances to direct ...

The idea of a lightsail comes from the fact that radiation pressure represents a mechanical pressure acting on a surface due to the exchange of momentum between it and an electromagnetic field. Since ...

The result is light that can create well-defined interference and diffraction patterns. 2 The use of coherent light in holography enables the creation of three-dimensional images by recording and ...

Institute of Multidisciplinary Research for Advanced Materials, Tohoku University, Katahira, Aoba-ku, Sendai 980-8577, Japan ...