We have our winners!
We polled our audience to determine their favorites among the cover submissions we received for the 2023 edition of our annual “year in optics” feature. The winner, by a big margin, was the cover we had originally selected (number 8, below); cover candidates 2 and 5 also received high marks.
1. Laser-driven bonding of two colloidal nanocrystals followed by 3D printing.
S.-F. Liu et al. / Tsinghua University [Image by Z.-W. Hou and S.-F. Liu]
2. Cell vibrations are excited by short pulses and detected by an optical microresonator.
S.-J. Tang et al. / Peking University and University of Technology Sydney [Image by C. Yang]
3. Artist’s representation of spatiotemporal photonic snake states.
S.B. Ivars et al. / UPV València, UPC Catalunya, RAS and BIST Barcelona [Image by M. Mañas-Carbonell]
4. Artist’s representation of an on-chip quantum light source.
R. Haldar et al. / Leibniz Univ. Hannover, Univ. of Twente, QuiX Quantum and Lionix Int’l [Image by R. Haldar and M. Kues]
5. Artist’s view of a quantum electro-optical device.
L. Qiu et al. / Institute of Science and Technology Austria [Image by E. Krantz, Krantz NanoArt]
6. A new approach to tracking moving objects through scattering media.
Y. Jauregui-Sánchez et al./ Queen’s University Belfast and University of Exeter [Image by Y. Jauregui-Sánchez]
7. Photograph of LVF-based module illuminated by a halogen lamp.
A. Kobylinskiy et al. / Univ. of Applied Sciences Jena, Univ. of Kassel and Fraunhofer IOF [Image by R. Brunner, Jena]
8. Artist’s impression of distorted light with a hidden invariance that is distortion-free.
A. Klug et al. / University of the Witwatersrand [Image by K. Singh, University of the Witwatersrand]
9. An array of single-atom qubits, cooled and trapped in a lattice of focused laser beams.
M. Schlosser et al. / Technical University of Darmstadt [Image by M. Schlosser]
10. Supermirrors fabricated by direct-bonding of GaAs/AlGaAs coatings to fused silica.
G.D. Cole et al. / Thorlabs [Image © Thorlabs Inc., photography by F. Jansenberger]
11. A high-res color scene, printed on silicon using closely spaced nanoscale “Mie voids.”
M. Hentschel et al. / Univ. of Stuttgart, Australian National Univ. and Univ. of Graz [Image by M. Hentschel]
12. Artist’s view of the SPDC process with a van der Waals crystal.
Q. Guo et al. / National Univ. of Singapore and Univ. of Science and Technology of China [Image by X.-Z. Qi and Q. Guo]
View all of the “Optics in 2023” research summaries: optica-opn.org/optics-in-2023.