New research led by the ARC Center of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS) at the University of Melbourne demonstrates a new way to make invisible infrared light visible without relying on the expensive detector technology used in today's infrared cameras.

New research led by the ARC Center of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS) at the University of Melbourne demonstrates a new way to make invisible infrared light visible without relying on the expensive detector technology used in today's infrared cameras.

Physicists at Leipzig University and Charles University in Prague have developed a method for changing the swimming style of tiny artificial microswimmers in real time. They can make a single microscopic particle switch at will between modes of swimming inspired by bacteria and algae. The researchers have thus turned a property that was previously fixed during production into a programmable parameter. They believe their findings pave the way for an evolutionary approach to the development of synthetic active matter. Their study has now been published in Nature Communications.

Light in the mid-infrared (mid-IR) portion of the electromagnetic spectrum plays a key role in modern sensing. Because molecules interact with this kind of light in specific ways, researchers use technologies like mid-IR spectroscopy to identify biological materials, drugs and pollutants. Mid-IR light can also serve as a carrier of information in free-space optical communications, where data are transmitted through the air without using cables or fibers. Better control of mid-IR light could therefore lead to more sensitive detectors and faster communications.

Researchers in the lab of Sam Peng, the Pfizer Inc.–Gerald Laubach Career Development Assistant Professor of Chemistry at MIT and a core institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, have developed a super-resolution imaging technology. It allows scientists to visualize molecular structures with angstrom-level localization precision—three orders of magnitude beyond the nanometer-scale limits of standard fluorescent dyes—while simplifying the imaging process.

Photographs can reveal things that are otherwise impossible for the naked eye to see, be they distant galaxies or microscopic cells. Researchers at Osaka Metropolitan University have developed a practical and versatile imaging technique that makes another usually invisible phenomenon visible: surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs), light waves that travel along metal surfaces.

Photonic microchips can process data at extremely high speeds and are embedded in a wide variety of today's technologies. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL) and Harvard University have now succeeded in developing three functional components for such chips that are up to 500 times smaller than conventional designs. The researchers used inverse design, a computer algorithm, to achieve this. The results are published in Nature Communications.