Swans on Tea

Light and Electrons Cooperate
I can just picture Big Bird:
Can you say, “cooperate?”
Can you say, “surface plasmon polariton?”
When light hits a metal, it can create a surface plasmon polariton–often called simply a “surface plasmon”–which is a traveling wave combining electromagnetic fields with electron oscillations. Researchers are using tiny plasmon antennas to funnel more light into solar [...]

Someone with a little time on their hands, feeds some AC/DC into their laser (OK, technically the waveform of the music), and watches the trapped atoms “dance”
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The low-pass filtering means it responds more to the bass and drums.

Shaping Single Photons
When you detect a photon, you can say where, when, and with what frequency it arrived, but before the measurement, these parameters are undefined. The photon’s existence is embodied in a wave function, which gives the probability of measuring the photon at any time, place, and frequency. The wave function for a single [...]

This month’s Physical Review Focus: Nanoparticles Stick a Perfect Landing
They found that for speeds less than 1.2 kilometers per second, the nanoparticle bounces off the surface like a basketball. But at higher speeds, some of the nanoparticle undergoes a phase transition to a compressed state called β-tin, where each atom bonds to six neighbors. [...]

Smoothest surface ever is a mirror for atoms
Metal materials reflect helium atoms much better but are harder to bend precisely into the right shape. Now materials scientists from the Autonomous University of Madrid led by Amadeo Vázquez de Parga have combined silicon and metal to make what they say is the smoothest surface ever made.
They [...]

Giving your new results away too soon
[W]here do you announce your results first: in the title? In the abstract? In the introduction? Or, in the results paragraph? If you wait to long your paper will become a whodunit and readers will get bored and stop reading your paper. If the clue of your paper is [...]

August 18, 1868. Jules Janssen “invents” helium. (At least, according to principal Skinner. “Curse the man who invented helium! Curse Pierre Jules César Janssen!)
Janssen was observing an eclipse and measured an emission line with a wavelength of 587.49 nm, which didn’t correspond to any known element. Norman Lockyer also observed the [...]

Jennifer’s enumeration of the PARTICLE BILL OF RIGHTS reminds me of a neat effect. I hope the second amendment
The right of unstable Particles to decay shall not be infringed.
only applies to militias fundamental particles, because people have been messing with that “right” for a while in atoms. These are demonstrated by some fascinating [...]

A pretty cool experiment that puts a lower bound on a speed of entanglement has been performed. The experimenters entangled photons, separated them, and then made their measurements.
Physicist Nicolas Gisin and colleagues at the University of Geneva in Switzerland split off pairs of quantum-entangled photons and sent them from the university’s campus [...]

Another cool find by Zapperz: Threading Light Through the Opaque
Freshly fallen snow is blinding white because the jumble of flakes scatter light in all directions. Such scattering also implies that little light passes through snow, so that if you’re ever buried deep in it, you’ll find yourself in the dark. But according to theoretical [...]

“Eddies,” said Ford, “in the space-time continuum.”
“Ah,” nodded Arthur, “is he. Is he.”
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Everyday Electromagnetism
This time, though, Eddies in the penny. And he enforces Lenz’s law.
You can see a similar effect if you drop a magnet down a copper pipe, because the eddy currents [...]

Say no more. gg explains dark states, electromagnetically-induced transparency and storing information coherently.
Freezing images in an atomic vapor! Probably no swimming costumes, though.