Optica is a peer-reviewed journal published by Optica Publishing Group covering optics and photonics research, including lasers, detectors, and imaging.
Bar-Ilan University researchers mapped 3D elemental composition 43 times faster than conventional approaches, using more than 97% less measurement data. The team says biological and geological samples come next, so the speedup has so far been shown on metals only.
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Brescia physicists built a wide-field microscope that uses ultrashort laser pulses to map electron interactions over femtoseconds. They propose it for finding flaws that limit solar cells and LEDs, but so far it has been shown on a single device a few atomic layers thick.
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University of Glasgow physicists turned a laser's frequency into the rotation of a camera image, where a 1 MHz shift moves the pattern almost 6 degrees. Its sub-megahertz resolution still trails the kilohertz-level precision of the best existing frequency measurements.
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A University of Houston group rebuilt a photothermal mid-infrared imager around mirrors and mid-infrared fiber, and in side-by-side tests their handheld probe matched a benchtop system's chemical detail on human cancer tissue.
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An Ottawa and Max Planck team ran spontaneous parametric down-conversion on solar light and measured a Bell parameter of 2.54. The parity with lasers is quoted per unit of pump bandwidth.
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NIST says it ran a superconducting single-photon wire out to a tenth of a millimeter by fencing it with current-carrying rails. The 98% detection figure still belongs to the narrow devices.
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