Purdue FW Department of Physics

08/13/2021

An international collaboration aims to couple ultrafast lasers with integrated photonics to create chip-scale devices.

07/28/2021

"It seems about time now for masers and lasers to become everyday tools of science, and for the exploratory work which has demonstrated so many new possibilities to be increasingly replaced by much more finished, more systematic, and more penetrating applications. It is this stage of quantum electronics which should yield the real benefits made available by the new methods of dealing with radiation."

Remembering Charles Townes who paved the way for the laser in our daily lives. In his Nobel Prize lecture in 1964 he spoke about the possible applications of using masers and lasers. Townes was born on 28 July in 1915.

Read his full lecture: https://bit.ly/2UwsIP5

Photo: Charles Townes and the first maser in June 1958. Dan Rubin, public domain via Wikimedia commons.

07/19/2021

Email suggests famed space telescope could quickly resume scientific observations

07/19/2021

Rosalyn Yalow was born on this day 100 years ago and grew up as a stubborn and single-minded child. Her parents wanted her to become a schoolmistress, but instead she became a nuclear physicist who revolutionised the medical world.

Yalow was awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for the development of radioimmunoassays of peptide hormones." With the help of radioimmunoassay, she proved that type 2 diabetes is caused by the body's inefficient use, rather than lack, of insulin.

Learn more: https://bit.ly/2D64qQd

07/19/2021

07/05/2021

In 1981, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer developed the scanning tunneling microscope. A microscope that transcended the limits of optical microscopes.

In optical microscopes the size of objects that can be observed is limited by the wavelength of light. The scanning tunneling microscope transcended this limit. The instrument is based on an extremely thin point that passes very close to a surface. A low electrical charge is positioned between the point and the surface, and through a quantum mechanical effect, the tunnel effect, a current arises that varies with the distance from the surface. The current is registered and allows the creation of an image in which objects as small as individual atoms can be distinguished.

Four years after revealing their new microscope, Binnig and Rohrer were awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics "for their design of the scanning tunneling microscope." They shared the award with Ernst Ruska.

Learn more about their research by reading their paper 'Surface Studies by Scanning Tunneling Microscopy' that was published on this day in 1982.

Read the publication: https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.49.57

06/30/2021

Rosalyn Yalow became a physicist at a time when being a woman was a serious impediment to success. But succeed she did. With her research partner Solomon Berson, she made a transformative contribution to medical research: radioimmunoassay, a method for measuring concentrations of substances in the b...

06/23/2021

For many years now, astronomers and physicists have been in a conflict. Is the mysterious dark matter that we observe deep in the Universe real, or is what we see the result of subtle deviations from the laws of gravity as we know them? In 2016, Dutch physicist Erik Verlinde proposed a theory of the...

06/21/2021

After earning her physics bona fides, she moved into biophysics.

06/19/2021

Niels Bohr was awarded the 1922 Physics Prize for his model of the structure of the atom. 53 years later his son Aage Bohr (right) was awarded the 1975 Physics Prize for work on the structure of the atomic nucleus.

06/17/2021

06/13/2021