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.
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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.
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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.
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.
"By using natural crystals for the first time, rather than artificial metamaterials, we have been able to scale up the size of the cloak and can hide larger objects, thousands of times bigger than the wavelength of the light, " said Shuang Zhang, the University of Birmingham physicist who led the research.
Here's the problem: these light-guiding structures need to be not much bigger than the wavelength of the light they're hiding from.
That lengthens the wavelength of the light and shifts it towards the red end of the colour spectrum.
That is far wider than is needed to accept a wavelength of natural light, which spans only 0.6 microns.
Optical lithography techniques become increasingly problematic as engineers build tinier devices--the wavelength of the light used to cast patterns onto silicon is already bigger than the width of the devices engineers want to create.
If the signature of an element is found at a wavelength that is slightly to the blue side of what experiments in a laboratory show, this means the star is moving towards the earth, making the wavelength of the light it was emitting slightly shorter.
Moreover, the technology could be used in "superlenses" to see details "finer than the wavelength of visible light, " but Dolling is reportedly more interested in studying the effects of his discovery than attempting to build any mystical devices, which is probably for the good of mankind, anyway.
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The wavelength of the laser light can be tuned to interfere only with u-235 and "excite" the molecules, raising their energy level.
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.
Thus your body and objects that are underneath your clothes will have a somewhat higher temperature than the surface of your clothes and will emit light of a different IR wavelength than the surface of your clothes does.
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This is the wavelength of the infra-red light normally used in optical communications.
The laser Mr Hansen uses emits light with a wavelength of 2, 940 nanometres, which is primarily absorbed by water.
The atoms in the gas will absorb certain colours of light, each of which corresponds to a particular wavelength.
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.
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