Optics in 2012

This special issue of Optics & Photonics News highlights the most exciting peer-reviewed optics research to have emerged over the past 12 months.

Accelerating Optical Beams

Finding non-paraxial accelerating Airy beams.

Fiber Technology

Light-steered waveguides, relief Bragg reflectors, sapphire derived fibers.

Imaging

Speckle-free laser imaging and gigapixel imaging

Imaging Through Turbid Media

Using compressive sensing and digital holography to visualize partially occluding media

Metamaterials

Metamaterials with tailorable properties and optical nanoantennas

Nanophotonics

Nanowire image sensor and photonic circuits made with Angstrom precision

Nonlinear Optics

Ultrafast KeV X-rays from tabletop femtosecond lasers

Novel Optical Detector

The near-field topography of light

Optical Coherence Tomography

Microscope in a needle, timereversal tomography and true-color molecular imaging

Optical Cooling

Spontaneous Brillouin cooling, lumino-refrigeration and controlling atoms with light

Optical Tweezers

Moiré-based tweezers, a tweezer assembly line, dynamic light cages and an optical “bottle”

Phase Control

Low-cost light shaping and SLIDAR

Spectroscopy

All-optical radiocarbon dating

Ultrafast Optics

Fast light and superluminal images, ultrafast optical clocks, and supercontinuum pulse compression

Heisenberg Certainty

Researchers gather evidence that Heisenberg’s famous principle is wrong.

A Potential Cure for Myopia

Using contact lenses to reshape the eye

Spectroscopy, Optics and Lasers in the City of the Diagonals

The city of La Plata has the highest concentration of scientific and techno-logical institutions in Argentina. Among these is the Optical Research Center, which is celebrating its 35th anniversary this year.

Spider Silk as an Optical Material

Who knew that spider silk, long studied for its tensile strength, could also act like an optical fiber?

In His Own Words: David Wineland

OSA Fellow and winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics (with Serge Haroche) for his work on quantum systems.

Teaching Green Photonics

Try these simple experiments to demonstrate how white light can be converted into energy by a solar panel and back to visible light through an LED.

2015: International Year of Light

OSA joins international optics community in push for U.N. declaration.

Using Laser Pointers for Chemical Sensing

Using ordinary green laser pointers, a research team from Ben Gurion University of the Negev (Israel) has developed a new and highly portable Raman spectrometer that can detect minute traces of hazardous chemicals in real time.

Pretty Practical

Researchers from North Carolina State University (U.S.A.) have created “nanoflowers” out of germanium sulfide (GeS).

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