Image of the Week
Striking images of optics and photonics, contributed by OPN readers

Golden Projection
A forgotten glass of ginger juice solves a geometrical problem. Ginger sediment has dried and cracked; illuminated from the bottom, the crack pattern is projected on the curved glass walls, forming swirly motifs.[OPN 2024 Photo Contest Honorable Mention]
—Sofia Magkiriadou, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
07 Feb 2025

Pseudo Schwarzschild-Radius
Two superimposed images of a randomly oscillating color-illuminated string, which were then subjected to rotations and polar coordinate transformations.[OPN 2024 Photo Contest Winner]
—Dan Curticapean, Offenburg University, Offenburg, Germany
31 Jan 2025

Scatterguiding
Light can propagate as a true waveguiding mode through diffusive materials, such as fog, tissue and resin (pictured). This is analogous to optical fibers, except the mechanism is diffusion using a contrast of scattering parameters to create localization. [OPN 2024 Photo Contest Third Place Tie]
—Kevin J. Mitchell, University of Glasgow, UK
24 Jan 2025

Glass into Glass
A 405-nm laser is shone through the marble ball from a Codd-neck bottle of the Japanese soft drink Ramune, which focuses the beam into a glass table. The yellow and green fluorescent responses likely arise from dopants such as uranium, manganese, cadmium or other elements or molecules in the glasses excited by the near-UV emission. [OPN 2024 Photo Contest Third Place Tie]
—Michael A. Gachich, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA
17 Jan 2025

Repairing Skull Bone
Section of mouse calvarial bone days after injury imaged through second-harmonic generation (SHG) microscopy, revealing changes in collagen organization and tissue remodeling. The SHG signal of fibrillar collagen is displayed in green, while blue shows the autofluorescence of primarily organic, non-collagen components in bone tissue.[OPN 2024 Photo Contest Second Place Tie]
—Maria Alice Paularie, Bruno Henrique Costa, Emerson Alberto da Fonseca, Leandro M. Malard, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, UFMG, Minas Gerais, Brazil; Érika Lorena Fonseca Costa de Alvarenga, Br
10 Jan 2025

Soap-Bubble Interference
Soap bubbles glimmer with light waves reflected from the back and front surfaces of the bubbles as they interfere with one another, thus concentrating the light to give a dynamic rainbow color appearance. [OPN 2024 Photo Contest, Second Place Tie]
—Sritam Kumar Sethy, M.pharma Student, Balasore, Odisha, India
03 Jan 2025

Spectral Wonderland
Image of holiday lights at Shoreacres State Park, OR, taken with a transmission diffraction grating, creates a spectral wonderland.
—Robert Schalck, Senior Member (Emeritus), North Bend, OR
27 Dec 2024

Water on the Moon
In a stop-action shot of water dripping from a faucet into a blue cup of water, motion is frozen by a flash that illuminates an image of the moon. The water drops act as lenses that bring the moon into focus, morphing from a cylindrical lens at the top to a spherical lens at the bottom.[OPN 2024 Photo Contest Editors’ Choice]
—Fredrik Fatemi, USA
20 Dec 2024

Plasma Water Drop
Laser-induced plasma on an acoustically levitated water drop. A 4-microliter water drop is levitated at the center of an acoustic cavity made by two arrays of compact ultrasonic transducers (cylinders at the top and bottom of the image). A laser pulse is fired and focused from left to right to hit the droplet and induce a plasma (white light).
— Victor Contreras, Instituto de Ciencias Físicas, UNAM, Cuernavaca, Mexico
13 Dec 2024

Surface Plasmon Polariton
A continuous spectrum laser passes through a linear polarizer to obtain p-polarized light that incides on the hyperbolic metamaterial composed of layers of titanium dioxide and gold to excite a surface plasmon polariton. This photo was taken in collaboration with Ricardo Téllez Limón.
—Citlalli Sosa, CICESE Unidad Académica Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico
06 Dec 2024