The diffraction spikes so familiar to us in space images are an intrinsic property of the telescope. Reflecting telescopes have two mirrors: a large primary and a smaller secondary. Light hits the ...

X-ray diffraction methods lie at the foundation of materials science. Determination of the crystal structures of natural minerals and, later, of crystals grown in the laboratory led to our ...

What is the Diffraction Limit? The diffraction limit is a fundamental barrier in optical microscopy that sets the minimum size of features that can be resolved using conventional light microscopes. It ...

X-ray powder diffraction (XRD) is a powerful structural characterization tool that is essentially a two point probe which measures the distance between all pairs of atoms within the diffraction volume ...

New method identifies altermagnets by signatures from circularly polarized light, validated in MnTe, speeding discovery for ...

Diffraction occurs when a wave encounters an obstruction in its path and will change direction, or wrap around it. In ocean waves, we see this occur when a wave encounters an object like a jetty and ...

For thousands of years, thinkers argued about whether light is made of particles or waves. At the beginning of the 20th ...

Stars in the new images from the James Webb Space Telescope look sharper than they did before. And I’m not just talking about the image quality, which is astounding. I’m talking about the fact that ...

Diffraction gratings are beautiful things, bending transmitted and reflected light and splitting it into its component wavelengths to create attractive iridescent rainbow patterns. It’s the same ...