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.
When physicists at the ARC Centre for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS) needed a key component for their terahertz experiments, they ran into a frustrating problem—they needed tiny optical devices, known as wire-grid ...
Optics & Photonics
Aug 21, 2026
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AR and VR glasses once seen only in science fiction may soon be realized not as bulky stacks of lenses but as a single eyeglass-like optical element. That future is now closer to reality.
Nanophysics
Aug 20, 2026
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53
Researchers from the MPIK in Heidelberg used an atomic gas as a time-dependent lens to shape and spectrally manipulate intense high-frequency laser pulses. This gas-based optical element could pave the way toward better XUV- ...
Optics & Photonics
Aug 20, 2026
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34
At the bottom of the ocean, optical fibers transmit telecommunications and internet data around the world. Waveguides make that feat possible by channeling and amplifying the light—and therefore the data within—over enormous ...
Optics & Photonics
Aug 19, 2026
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58
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
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72
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
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41
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
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61
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
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162
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
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73
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
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