Folien, die in allen denkbaren Farben leuchten, fluoreszierende Tapeten: Mit organischen Leuchtdioden wollen Forscher und Unternehmen die Beleuchtungsindustrie umkrempeln. Anwen Roberts und Wolfgang Stieler beschreiben in "Technology Review" die Holpersteine der OLED-Technologie.

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Auf dem Weg zum Photonenrechner: Lichtquanten können ihresgleichen kontrollieren und auch steuern. Einzelne Atome helfen ihnen dabei und werden plötzlich unsichtbar.
Seit seiner Erfindung vor 50 Jahren hat der Laser viele Früchte in Wissenschaft und Technik hervorgebracht. So haben Laserstrahlen die schnelle Übertragung von Daten ermöglicht und die Telekommunikation revolutioniert und dadurch das Internet erst so richtig in Schwung gebracht.

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Fifty years ago next Sunday, a 32-year-old engineer called Theodore Maiman switched on a gadget at Hughes Research Laboratories in California, and watched as pulses of light sprang from a pink ruby crystal.

It was a geek eureka: the moment when the laser was born. And the world would change forever. But not just yet.

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Common carriage is an ancient idea being applied to a modern problem - internet access

IT sounds like the most modern of regulatory problems. All internet services involve shipping bits of digital information from one computer to another. These bits are gathered into packets and sent as electrical signals down phone wires or cable networks (which can be pretty fast) or as pulses of light along optical fibres (which is faster still).

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Vor 50 Jahren wurde der Laser erfunden. Die Entdeckung lag schon lange in der Luft. Ein junger amerikanischer Ingenieur hatte als erster das richtige experimentelle Gespür und zündete mit einem Rubinkristall die ersten Laserblitze.

Als am Morgen des 16. Mai 1960 Theodore Maiman und sein Assistent, Charles Asawa, einen verspiegelten Rubinkristall mit einer hellen Blitzlampe beleuchteten, machten sie eine bahnbrechende Entdeckung.

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Optical devices are finally going inside computers, but only in parts

GOD is light”, says the Bible. Light is also a source of inspiration in computing. Ever since the first optical transistors were developed in the late 1980s, researchers have dreamed of building a light-powered computer, radiating with knowledge. Yet this breakthrough has proved elusive. Now, however, new developments mean that optical technologies are starting to appear inside computers.

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A YEAR ago, Congress asked for a plan that would provide affordable broadband service to all America’s citizens. On March 16th, the Federal Communications Commission responded with a non sequitur: a national wireless plan which is good in its way, but which largely fails to tackle the problem it was asked to solve.

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La nouvelle génération de lampes arrive déjà. Plus performantes, moins gourmandes en électricité et tellement plus design!

Les lampes à basse consommation ont à peine commencé à remplacer les ampoules à incandescence que, déjà, une nouvelle génération arrive : les diodes électroluminescentes, plus généralement appelées LED. «D'ici à 2020, les LED pourraient représenter 75 % du marché de l'éclairage », estime Christophe Bresson, directeur commercial de l'activité éclairage de Philips.

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Daniel Bradley an early pioneer and world leader in laser physics. He was best known for his work on the development of ultra-fast pulsed lasers and high-efficiency dye lasers. He foresaw the huge potential of lasers in understanding biological processes and in optical communications. He made a huge contribution by inspiring a new generation of laser scientists in Britain and Ireland, many of whom became international leaders in their field.

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Scientists have come a step closer to making Harry Potter-style invisibility cloaks a reality.

Researchers at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, in Germany, have created the first device to render an object invisible in three dimensions.

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