The University of Texas at Austin with support from the U.S. Department of Energy will expand capabilities of the Texas Petawatt Laser, one of the highest-powered lasers in the world, with a broad range of applications for basic research, advanced manufacturing and medicine.
As computers advance, encryption methods currently used to keep everything from financial transactions to military secrets secure might soon be useless, technology experts warn. Reporting today in the journal Nature, a team of physicists and engineers led by University of Texas at Austin physics professor Xiaoqin Elaine Li report they have created a material with light-emitting properties that might enable hack-proof communications, guaranteed by the laws of quantum mechanics.
The University of Texas at Austin will be a key player in LaserNetUS, a new national network of institutions operating high-intensity, ultrafast lasers. The overall project, funded over two years with $6.8 million from the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Fusion Energy Sciences, aims to help boost the country's global competitiveness in high-intensity laser research.
Much of what Dr. Xiaoqin "Elaine" Li researches is completely invisible to the human eye. She works with materials that are merely a few atoms thick and observes processes that occur within a trillionth of a second.
The W. M. Keck Foundation has awarded scientists at The University of Texas at Austin two grants totaling $1.5 million to develop a powerful, alternative method for cooling atoms and involve more undergraduate students in using new advanced technologies for research.
Scientists at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a technique to move and position a single bacterium using a highly focused laser. The precise control offered by this tool will allow researchers to better study how bacterial biofilms form.
Scientists in the Department of Physics have captured the ultimate high-speed movie of a laser pulse as it zips through a piece of glass at the speed of light. The new imaging technique will help scientists understand how intense laser pulses propagate through air, glass fibers and fusion pellets, and thus could have applications in atmospheric chemical analysis, fiber optic communications, and power generation.
Photographer Robert Shults looks for the sublime in his images of the Texas Petawatt Laser.
Physicists at The University of Texas at Austin have built a tabletop particle accelerator that can generate energies and speeds previously reached only by major facilities that are hundreds of meters long and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build.
Read our publication, The Texas Scientist, a digest covering the people and groundbreaking discoveries that make the College of Natural Sciences one of the most amazing and significant places on Earth.
