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When a charged particle penetrates through an optical interface, photon emissions emerge - a phenomenon known as transition radiation. Being paramount to fundamental physics, transition radiation has enabled many applications from…
Maxwell's equations, formulated 150 years ago, ultimately describe properties of light, from classical electromagnetism to quantum and relativistic aspects. The latter ones result in remarkable geometric and topological phenomena related to…
In the recent years, we observe a dramatic boost of research in photonics empowered by the concepts of machine learning and artificial intelligence. The corresponding photonic systems, to which this new methodology is applied, can range…
Investigations of living organisms have led biologists and physicians to introduce fundamental concepts, including Brownian motion, the First Law of Thermodynamics, Poiseuille's Law of fluid flow, and Fick's Law of diffusion into physics.…
In the 20th century, quantum mechanics connected the particle and wave concepts of light and thereby made mechanisms accessible that had never been imagined before. Processes such as stimulated emission and quantum entanglement have…
Electromagnetism is at the heart of the Standard Model, but despite all the successes of modern theory, our basic description of light traveling in free space remains unsatisfactory. The four bosons that compose light are introduced in a…
Partial polarization is the manifestation of the correlation between two mutually orthogonal transverse field components associated with a light beam. We show both theoretically and experimentally that the origin of this correlation can be…
Introductory calculus-based physics textbooks state that electromagnetic waves are transverse and list many of their properties, but most such textbooks do not bring forth arguments why this is so. Both physical and theoretical arguments…
Let us abandon for a moment the strict epistemological standpoint of quantum field theory, that eventually comes to declare nonsensical any question about the photon posed outside the quantum theoretical framework. We can then avail of the…
Wave-particle duality is often considered as the modern answer to the problem of the nature of light after more than 2000 years of questioning. It is also the answer given by quantum physics concerning the nature of matter particles and any…
Quantum imaging is emerging as a transformative approach for biomedical applications, applying nonclassical properties of light, such as entanglement, squeezing, and quantum correlations, to overcome fundamental limits of conventional…
Two transformative waves of computing have redefined the way we approach science. The first wave came with the birth of the digital computer, which enabled scientists to numerically simulate their models and analyze massive datasets. This…
When most people think of physics, they think of what they learned in high school physics: that the world is fundamentally predictable. Given the position and velocity of a particle in space, it should be possible to predict its position at…
One of the main activities in science teaching, and in particular in Physics teaching, is not only the discussion of both modern problems and problems which solution is an urgent matter. It means that the picture of an active and alive…
A novel quantum imaging technique has recently been demonstrated in an experiment, where the photon used for illuminating an object is not detected; the image is obtained by interfering two beams, none of which ever interacts with the…
Cameras were originally designed using physics-based heuristics to capture aesthetic images. In recent years, there has been a transformation in camera design from being purely physics-driven to increasingly data-driven and task-specific.…
In this paper is presented a simple alternative model of the dual nature of light, based on the deliberate inversion of the original statement from P. A. M. Dirac: "Each photon interferes only with itself. Interference between different…
The asymmetrical path interference test of light is put forward in the paper. In the test, two different results would arise under the same experimental conditions if light is regarded as wave or particle. Therefore, the test can help us to…
Interference is the mechanism through which waves can be structured into the most fascinating patterns. While for sensing, imaging, trapping, or in fundamental investigations, structured waves play nowadays an important role and are…
This is a brief history of photons, both soft and hard, real and virtual. About 150-100 years ago, Maxwell and Einstein discovered intriguing properties of electromagnetic fields and how to understand them both macroscopically and…