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Researchers from Munich and Boston have shown that multispectral photoacoustic tomography can image fluorescent proteins buried deep in highly scattering living organisms.
Resonant energy-relay between two dye species allows photovoltaic harvesting of photons across a wider spectral range. This technique has been exploited to boost the efficiency of dye-sensitized solar cells by 26%.
Researchers in Japan have shown that it is possible to use standard 'off-the-shelf' plastic toy parts to construct low-cost and light-weight optical components.
Diffraction of light prevents optical microscopes from having spatial resolution beyond a value comparable to the wavelength of the probing light. This essentially means that visible light cannot image nanomaterials. Here we review the mechanism for going beyond this diffraction limit and discuss how manipulation of light by means of surface plasmons propagating along the metal surface can help to achieve this. The interesting behaviour of light under the influence of plasmons not only allows superlensing, in which perfect imaging is possible through a flat thin metal film, but can also provide nano-imaging of practical samples by using a localized surface plasmon mode at the tip of a metallic nanoprobe. We also discuss the current research status and some intriguing future possibilities.
Liquid suspensions of semiconductor nanocrystals that can be printed or coated onto a substrate promise a new era of low-cost optoelectronics. The demonstration of infrared image sensors and displays based on this approach and fully integrated with silicon electronics suggests that the technology is maturing rapidly.
Light beams striking a flat surface are commonly considered to reflect with perfect symmetry. But highly precise experiments in the infrared region have now confirmed that this is not truly the case in practice, and the size of the angular deviation has now been measured.
Researchers have demonstrated a reconfigurable photonic circuit on a chip that can create a four-photon entangled state. The scalability and compactness of the device opens the door towards practical quantum computation.
The ability to measure distances with high precision is of fundamental importance. Femtosecond optical frequency combs offer an intriguing solution to the problem and could prove invaluable in space satellite missions of the future.
The creation of institutes dedicated to combining photonics research and education under one roof is helping the field to thrive. The latest country to embrace the idea is Australia, with the opening of a new institute in Sydney.
The construction of a polymer solar cell that can successfully collect an electron and hole for almost every incident photon suggests that great improvements in the efficiency of organic photovoltaics should be possible.
Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have generated billions of positrons, forming the highest antimatter densities ever created on earth, by using superintense short laser pulses.
Random lasers can be made simply by grinding a laser crystal and optically pumping the resulting powder. The physics behind the resulting laser emission is rich but has led to much controversy. New experiments may now settle the debate behind their operation.
Pigmented inks in a microfluidic structure provide a new approach for fabricating bright, colourful electronic paper with a reflectivity of greater than 50%. The challenge now is to combine the scheme with fully functioning drive electronics.
