Multimedia / After Images

After Image

The beauty of light, as seen on the last page of each OPN issue

A Converging Beam
A Converging Beam

A converging beam of 405 nm wavelength is made to pass through the tilted lens in which the angle of incidence exceeds the critical angle and manifests in several internal reflections.     

—Satyajeet Patil, Physical Research Laboratory, Department of Space, India

01 Oct 2020

Rainbow Colors in Plastic Cutlery
Rainbow Colors in Plastic Cutlery

Rainbow colors in plastic cutlery, laid on a computer screen and imaged through a linear polarizer, show areas of differential local stress in the material when the cutlery was manufactured. The colors highlight variations in the material’s birefringence, which depends on the local stress state and the wavelength of light.     

—Morgan Facchin, University of St. Andrews, U.K.

01 Sep 2020

A polarization “painting” inspired by Kandinsky
A polarization “painting” inspired by Kandinsky

Layers of colorless adhesive tape are cut, oriented, and sandwiched between crossed polarizing sheets. The tape is birefringent and dichroic, allowing for a wide palate of colors to be perceived in transmitted sunlight. 

—Aaron D. Slepkov,  Trent University, Canada

01 Jul 2020

Orb of Light
Orb of Light

Light painting orb created with an LED attached to a gyroscope. Precession is traced as the system loses energy.  

—Edgar Guevara, CONACYT-UASLP,  San Luis Potosí, México

01 Jun 2020

Time-integrating far-field spatial pattern
Time-integrating far-field spatial pattern

Time-integrating far-field spatial pattern of multiple-slit spatiotemporal interferometry (MSTI), when the input ultrafast pulsed beam possesses pulse-front curvature.  

—Zhaoyang Li, Institute of Laser Engineering, Osaka University

01 May 2020

Cuvettes with Fluorescent Dyes
Cuvettes with Fluorescent Dyes

Two plastic cuvettes, filled with different fluorescent dyes, are simultaneously excited by lasers operating at two different wavelengths. The left-hand cuvette, filled with Hoechst33342, shows greenish fluorescence with 375-nm laser excitation; the right-hand cuvette, with propidium iodide, fluoresces red with 488-nm excitation.   

—Tatevik Chalyan, B-PHOT Brussels Photonics Team, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium

01 Apr 2020

Colored solar crescents
Colored solar crescents

During a solar eclipse, the sun’s image, reflected from the screen of a mobile phone, is diffracted by the screen’s pixels, giving rise to multiple colored solar crescents.  

—Akhileshwar Mishra,  IISER Thiruvananthapuram, India

01 Mar 2020

The Soyuz MS-15 spacecraft
The Soyuz MS-15 spacecraft

The Soyuz MS-15 spacecraft ascending into space after its launch from Kazakhstan on Wednesday, 25 September 2019, photographed from aboard the International Space Station.  

—NASA Expedition 60 astronaut Christina Koch

01 Feb 2020

Two-photon fluorescence
Two-photon fluorescence

Counter-propagating femtosecond laser beams excite two-photon fluorescence in dye cuvettes. A bright zone appears near the center where the pulses meet.  

—Theodor W. Hänsch and Nathalie Picqué, MPI of Quantum Optics

01 Jan 2020

An optical fiber with 3-D printed doublet Fresnel lenses
An optical fiber with 3-D printed doublet Fresnel lenses

An optical fiber with 3-D printed doublet Fresnel lenses is inserted into a water droplet for imaging the beam profile by an inverse microscope. A white-light laser, passed through the microscope objective for alignment, causes the 3-D printed structure’s blue color in the refracted image on the droplet surface. [OPN 2019 Photo Contest Editors’ Choice] 

—Asa Asadollahbaik and Moritz Floess,  4th Physics Institute, University of Stuttgart, Germany

01 Dec 2019

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