Optical materials and elements, considered as a physical system, comprise engineered media and components that manipulate electromagnetic radiation in the optical frequency range through controlled refraction, reflection, diffraction, absorption, and emission. This system includes bulk and nanostructured dielectrics, semiconductors, and metals configured as lenses, mirrors, prisms, gratings, filters, waveplates, and coatings, characterized by parameters such as complex refractive index, dispersion, nonlinear susceptibilities, and anisotropy. Their collective behavior determines wavefront shaping, spectral and polarization control, and spatiotemporal light propagation, underpinning the performance of optical assemblies in imaging, beam delivery, photonic integration, and laser systems.
Mirrors normally reveal what is placed in front of them, even when their curvature distorts a reflection. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have introduced a different optical concept: a "lying ...
Optics & Photonics
Aug 10, 2026
0
69
Supercontinuum light sources—often called "white lasers" because they emit a broad, continuous rainbow of colors—are essential tools for everything from advanced medical imaging to environmental gas detection. However, researchers ...
Optics & Photonics
Aug 6, 2026
0
40
Researchers at the 4th Physics Institute of the University of Stuttgart and the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) in Milan have demonstrated a new mechanism for directing light in a naturally hyperbolic van der Waals ...
Nanophysics
Aug 4, 2026
0
60
Modern photonic chips can pack sophisticated optical functions onto devices smaller than a fingernail. They are increasingly used to generate, manipulate and measure light for applications ranging from communications to sensing. ...
Optics & Photonics
Aug 4, 2026
0
159
When designing microscopes, optical engineers have long faced a trade-off between speed, field of view and resolution. But improving one of these properties typically comes at the expense of another. Now, a UC Berkeley–led ...
Optics & Photonics
Aug 3, 2026
0
70
Researchers at the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering have developed a new approach to nanoscale 3D printing that improves both speed and fidelity, overcoming a challenge that has limited the technology's ...
Nanophysics
Aug 3, 2026
0
19
Researchers in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have discovered a new type of quantum light emitter in diamonds that could help overcome a number of challenges ...
Optics & Photonics
Jul 31, 2026
0
35
An international team of researchers from École Polytechnique, Collège de France and Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has achieved a world first: the experimental realization of an all-optical photonic time crystal ...
Optics & Photonics
Jul 30, 2026
0
233
There's a nice kind of irony buried in this story: One of the most sensitive instruments ever built, capable of measuring distortions smaller than the width of a proton, has been quietly held back by something as mundane ...
Astronomy
Jul 30, 2026
0
44
Full-color displays normally require separate red, green and blue light emitters. A team from the University of Osaka and Ritsumeikan University has demonstrated another approach: a single light-emitting layer that produces ...
Optics & Photonics
Jul 30, 2026
0
40
