Theodore Maiman, who built the first working laser, passed away on 5 May aged 79. Maiman made his breakthrough in 1960 by generating pulses of coherent light from a fingertip-sized lump of ruby ...

Light's shadow: Researchers showed that a laser beam can sometimes act like a solid object and cast a shadow that is visible to the naked eye. In the picture, the shadow appears as the horizontal line ...

Darwin Quiroz is exploring new frontiers in miniature lasers with major biomedical applications. When Quiroz first started working with optics as an undergraduate, he was developing atomic ...