Usually, light waves can pass through each other without any resistance. According to the laws of electrodynamics, two light beams can exist in the same place without influencing each other; they simply overlap. Lightsaber battles, as seen in science fiction films, would therefore be rather boring in reality.
Ghost imaging is like a game of Battleship. Instead of seeing an object directly, scientists use entangled photons to remove the background and reveal its silhouette. This method can be used to study microscopic environments without much light, which is helpful for avoiding photodamage to biological samples.
Gold remains perfectly solid when briefly heated beyond previously hypothesized limits, a new study reports, which may mean a complete reevaluation of how matter behaves under extreme conditions.
The international team of scientists behind the study used intense, super-short laser blasts to push thin fragments of gold past a limit known as the entropy catastrophe; the point at which a solid becomes too hot to resist melting. It’s like a melting point, but for edge cases where the physics isn’t conventional.
In a phenomenon called superheating, a solid can be heated too quickly for its atoms to have time enter a liquid state. Crystals can remain intact way past their standard melting point, albeit for a very, very brief amount of time.
