In two of the trials, the box was dark for 12 minutes and then illuminated for 48 minutes with either long-wavelength red light or short-wavelength blue light directed at the subjects' corneas. (Light color is determined by its wavelength.) The box was dark in a control experiment.
In the case of light whose wavelength is an exact submultiple of this distance, crest falls on crest, and trough on trough, reinforcing the colour.
That bit of trickery works because the light can be manipulated when the material is shaped with features about as big as the light's wavelength - less than a millionth of a metre for light that we can see.
The laser Mr Hansen uses emits light with a wavelength of 2, 940 nanometres, which is primarily absorbed by water.
Researchers said that result doesn't rule out the possibility that short-wavelength light also could be an alerting stimulus in the afternoon.
Under normal conditions, this Lilliputian wire allows 1.5-micron-wavelength light to pass through.
And when Dr Anderson injected the modified vesicles into mice and then shone ultraviolet light of a wavelength that can pass through flesh at some of them, he found the tactic worked.
They created a material that excluded light with a wavelength of one millimetre (the long end of the infra-red spectrum), using an array of aluminium-oxide posts that were spaced evenly across a grid.
Dr Lin is already testing a waveguide designed to steer light with a wavelength of 1.5 microns, and he is also working on three-dimensional waveguides made of silicon, which will provide almost total control over the path the light takes, and make really complex optical circuits possible.
Light at a specific wavelength is beamed into the brain, and the oxygen present will absorb some of that light.
Here's the problem: these light-guiding structures need to be not much bigger than the wavelength of the light they're hiding from.
"It is not trivial to make the necessary amount of laser light at a specific wavelength, " Robicheaux said.
The features on a chip would shrink so much that they would be smaller than a wavelength of light.
Already semiconductors are commonly produced with resolutions that are a fraction of the wavelength of light used to produce them.
To do this, they used interference reflection microscopy, a technique that reveals details smaller than the wavelength of light itself.
Then, arriving at the tumor site, it would be completely inactive until the specific wavelength of light is shone onto the particles.
However there are lots of commercial issues with a UV optical disc besides creating inexpensive devices to generate this wavelength of light.
FORBES: What is the Future of Optical Disc Technology and who will Use It?
These days the wavelength of light used starts out at 193 nanometers.
By controlling the inner and outer thickness of this metallic shell we can control the wavelength of light that this nanoparticle will absorb.
In order to make a photonic crystal, though, the materials have to be organised into structures no more than a wavelength of light apart.
The photoswitch turns the glutamate receptor on or off by changing its shape depending on the wavelength of light used a technique that's been shown to induce light sensitivity in blind mice.
WSJ: What Might Innovation Award Winners Look Like in Five or 10 Years?
Made from a flexible polymer film suffused with fluorescent particles, the prototypes catch only a specific wavelength of light and shoot it to an array of sensors that surround the sheet's edge.
The harder part will be designing a detector that can distinguish between two adjacent letters on a DNA strand, which are half a nanometer apart, a small fraction of the wavelength of light.
Silicon has been the favored insulator for tiny wires and switches ever since, even as successive generations of chip wires and switches have been shrunk to the width of a single wavelength of light.
Now they have something that works like a flatbed document scanner, with a scanning head containing either six or 12 light-emitting diodes, each emitting light of a specific wavelength between 350 nanometres (ultraviolet) and 800 nanometres (infra-red).
The harder part will be designing a detector that can distinguish between two adjacent letters on a DNA strand, which are half a nanometer apart, a small fraction of the wavelength of light (which makes it impossible to see them).
Roger Linfield and his colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who are in charge of the mission, aim to show that spacecraft flying in formation can be controlled so precisely that the distance between them varies by only a tiny fraction of a wavelength of light.
The infra-red light from dust heated by a star has a much longer wavelength ie, is cooler than most of the light from the star itself, so a camera tuned to the right wavelength can pick out a dust disc without being totally blinded by the stellar glare.
In 1998 chipmakers took up so-called deep ultraviolet light, which has a wavelength of 0.248 microns.
应用推荐