Image of the Week
Striking images of optics and photonics, contributed by OPN readers
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
Photonic Art
An image taken from the DigitalDNA photonic art project. The goal of the project is to render a TeraScale artwork, 1012 pixels, as a nanoscale reflective artwork with pixel sizes of about 100 nm, blue laser λ/4.
—Stefan Samociuk, Penlon Farm, West Wales, UK
29 Nov 2024
Fiber Speckle Pattern
Red laser light from the end-facet of a short sample of multimode polymer optical fiber was inspected on a black screen. The web pattern disappeared when optimizing the laser input coupling, with speckles from the expected guided modes available for further study, here seen in overlay.
—Dirk Voigt, Leiden, Netherlands
22 Nov 2024
Smartphone Diffraction
An incandescent light bulb illuminating a smartphone screen creates a colorful diffraction pattern due to the pixelated nature of the screen.
—Alok Kumar Pandey, Imagine Optic, Orsay, France
15 Nov 2024
Soap Bubble Interference
Image of soap bubbles on a finger exhibiting thin film interference from a backlight. There also is a top light to provide better light coverage. Photo taken with a Fujifilm X-T5 using a Fujinon 30 mm macro lens and processed with Adobe Lightroom. [Thanks to Mehmet Bütün for providing ideas for the photo.]
—Berke Köker, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey
08 Nov 2024
Fractals of Light
Chaotic scattering of light from a system made of four silvered spheres stacked like cannonballs to form a pyramid, inspired by E. Ott et al. Nature 399, 315 (1999).
—Andrea Aiello, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, Erlangen, Germany
01 Nov 2024
Additive Color
Focused red, green and blue lasers visualised using graphite powder. The intersection of the beams appears white due to additive color mixing.
—Anatolii Kashchuk, Ukraine, Wiki Science Competition 2021; CC-BY-4.0
25 Oct 2024
Aurora Borealis
The aurora visible from southern Oregon, USA. The pole star Polaris can be seen just above the rays pointing toward it.
—Robert Schalck, Senior Member (Emeritus), North Bend, OR, USA
18 Oct 2024
