When a magnetic material is bombarded with short pulses of laser light, it loses its magnetism within femtoseconds (10 –15 seconds). The spin, or angular momentum, of the electrons in the material ...

Introduction You might have seen figure skaters spinning around quickly and then tucking their arms to spin faster—or opening them to spin more slowly. This happens, thanks to a physics concept known ...

In an introductory physics course, there are three big ideas. There is the work-energy principle, the momentum principle and then the angular momentum principle. I'll skip the work-energy principle ...

When a magnetic material like nickel is zapped with an incredibly short laser pulse, it loses its magnetism almost instantly within femtoseconds, or a millionth of a billionth of a second. But physics ...

Photons can have half-integer values of angular momentum when they are confined to fewer than three dimensions. That is the conclusion of physicists in Ireland, who have revived an experiment first ...

Optical vortices are currently one of the most intensively studied topics in optics. These light beams, which carry orbital angular momentum (OAM), have been successfully utilized in the visible and ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it. You can take any particle in the Universe and isolate it from ...