Image of the Week

An Accidental Laser Beam

A lens from the optical bench. An accidental laser beam propagates into one of the lenses of the optical bench.

—Svetlen H. Tonchev, MKS Instruments Inc., Rochester, NY, USA

19 Oct 2020

Birefringence

Birefringence from liquid crystals atop nanostructured pixel arrays (under the optical microscope) displays unusual color arrangements.

—Calum Williams, University of Cambridge, U.K.

12 Oct 2020

Optics in a Wine Glass

Gel beads in a wine glass with super bright LED. Image taken while the glass was ringing.

—Tim M. Platt, Sigma, USA

05 Oct 2020

A Sunset View

The splitting of the rays of the sun—the primary source of light to the planet—in the evening sky.

—Sangbaran Sanyal, University of Engineering and Management, Kolkata, India

28 Sep 2020

Photoelasticity in a plastic wine glass

Picture taken using a smartphone, a linear polarizer, a plastic wine glass, and a laptop LCD screen. The image has not been processed or edited in any way.

—Antonio J. Del Águila-Carrasco, University of Plymouth, U.K.

21 Sep 2020

Beauty from a Fabrication Error

This beautiful pattern appeared randomly on the sample due to fabrication mistake. A thin-film, deposited on a silicon dioxide sample, and it had a rectangular shape. Once I put it inside the PECVD chamber to deposit silicon dioxide on top to protect it, instead, I accidentally ran the PECVD clean process, which uses very high RF power with gases that started to remove the thin film. It created this symmetric pattern on the sample surface.

—Amirmahdi Honardoost, CREOL, The College of Optics & Photonics, University of Central Florida, USA

14 Sep 2020

The Cat's-Eye Effect

A demonstration of the cat’s-eye effect, using a single LED as the light source behind a grid of parallel wires. The setup forms a light stripe due to the reflection of light in each wire. The cat’s-eye effect or chatoyance was explored in our Condensed Matter paper “Jumping sundogs, cat’s eye and ferrofluids,” which includes more information about this picture; the paper is available at https://www.mdpi.com/2410-3896/5/3/45.

—Alberto Tufaile, Soft Matter Lab/EACH, University of São Paulo, Brazil

07 Sep 2020

Dichroic Mirror

White light from the LED lamp illuminating an optical tweezer is turned fuchsia because of the absence of green light bounced by the dichroic mirror. Image taken with a smartphone at the Optical Micromanipulation Laboratory, IF UNAM.

—Félix E. Torres, Instituto de Física, UNAM, Mexico

31 Aug 2020

An LED Rainbow

A seventh-order cylindrical-symmetry grating creates an RGB LED rainbow.

—Vahram Mekhitarian, Armenia

24 Aug 2020

$A Diffraction Demo$

A Diffraction Demo

In this demonstration of the wavelength dependence of diffraction, run at a photonics outreach event, red and green laser pointers are combined via total internal reflection in an acrylic prism, and then made incident on a plastic grating. Reflected orders are also visible.

—Srikanth Sugavanam, Aston Institute of Photonic Technologies, Aston University, U.K.

17 Aug 2020

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