Just about every car, train and plane that's been built since 1970 has been manufactured using high-power lasers that shoot a continuous beam of light. These lasers are strong enough to cut steel, ...

Today, most mirrors used to direct the beam in high-power continuous wave lasers are made by layering thin coatings of materials with different optical properties. But if there is even one, tiny ...

SLAC and Stanford PhD student Rachel Margraf and SLAC scientist Gabriel Marcus align the cavity’s four diamond crystal mirrors from the experiment’s control room. The mirrors appear in the two upper ...

Researchers have built a mirror out of one of the strongest materials on the planet: diamond. By etching nanostructures onto the surface of a thin sheet of diamond, the research team built a highly ...