When people look into a mirror, they see an image of themselves behind the glass. That image results from light rays encountering the shiny surface and bouncing back, or reflecting, providing a ...

Infinite mirrors are a fun party trick, but the physics behind this phenomenon explains why it may not be true. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s ...

Go find a makeup mirror. There's a good chance you have one in the bathroom. You know the type—it has a surface that shows you a zoomed-in image of your face. If you have one nearby, you can use this ...

Two separate teams of scientists have built the thinnest mirrors in the world: sheets of molybdenum diselenide (MoSe2), each just a single atom wide. The mirrors were developed at the same time at ...

Ever wonder how a mirror works? If you want to find the path that light takes when reflecting off a surface, you could use Fermat's Principle. This states something like this: The path that light ...

By miniaturizing THz spectroscopy to a chip-scale platform, James McIver’s lab has uncovered a promising new method for controlling quantum materials. Under certain conditions, two-dimensional (2D) ...

Exploiting a novel technique called phase discontinuity, researchers have induced light rays to behave in a way that defies the centuries-old laws of reflection and refraction. The discovery has led ...

The authors have designed a mirror based on a well-established system in modern optical physics known as a photonic crystal 2. This is a dielectric (non-conducting) material that is patterned, often ...

If you shine a light at a mirror, the beam is reflected inward to a central focal point, bouncing back toward you in a predictable manner—it’s a simple reflection of light, a spatial inversion. When a ...

Researchers have developed a novel experimental platform to measure the electric fields of light trapped between two mirrors with a sub-cycle precision. These electro-optic Fabry-Perot resonators will ...

Reflect Orbital, a California-based startup, has asked the FCC for approval to launch its first experimental satellite as early as 2026. The company's long-term plan – ...