News

Sandia Labs News Releases

Tag Archives: optics

Advanced materials in a snap

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — If everything moved 40,000 times faster, you could eat a fresh tomato three minutes after planting a seed. You could fly from New York to L.A. in half a second. And you’d have waited in line at airport security for that flight for 30 milliseconds. Thanks to machine learning, designing materials for […]

Mirage software automates design of optical metamaterials

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — New software lets users design science-fiction-like materials with the same efficiency that architects draft building plans. Watch a preview of Mirage, software developed by Sandia to make optical engineering (relatively) easy. The cubes in the video are blueprints of meta-atoms, nanosized building blocks that give metamaterials their distinctive, unusual properties valued for […]

Sandia light mixer generates 11 colors simultaneously

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A multicolor laser pointer you can use to change the color of the laser with a button click — similar to a multicolor ballpoint pen — is one step closer to reality thanks to a new tiny synthetic material made at Sandia National Laboratories. A flashy laser pointer may be fun to […]

Nanotechnology experts at Sandia create first terahertz-speed polarization optical switch

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A Sandia National Laboratories-led team has for the first time used optics rather than electronics to switch a nanometer-thick thin film device from completely dark to completely transparent, or light, at a speed of trillionths of a second. The team led by principal investigator Igal Brener published a Nature Photonics paper this […]

Lighting up the study of low-density materials

Sandia Labs develops way to spot defects inside hard-to-image materials ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — It’s hard to get an X-ray image of low-density material like tissue between bones because X-rays just pass right through like sunlight through a window. But what if you need to see the area that isn’t bone? Sandia National Laboratories studies myriads […]

New fog chamber provides testing options that could improve security cameras

Controlled fog at Sandia Labs makes testing optics more cost-effective, efficient ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Fog can play a key role in cloaking military invasions and retreats and the actions of intruders. That’s why physical security experts seek to overcome fog, but it’s difficult to field test security cameras, sensors or other equipment in fog that […]