Optics

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Following the Photons: A Photonics Podcast
This episode of Following the Photons: A Photonics Podcast features our Light News photonics news roundup for July 7, 2026.
July 7, 2026
Credit: F. Kamphues, ESO/M. Kornmesse
Satellites crossing the night sky above the northern Atacama Desert in Chile during an hour. It’s a stack of a time-lapse video taken on October 15, 2025, about two hours after sunset. Some streaks are caused by planes, easily identified by blinking-colored lights, but most trails are from satellites. In the foreground is the dome of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope, the world’s largest optical/infrared telescope, currently under construction atop Cerro Armazones. Behind it are the lasers of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Paranal Observatory, 22 km away.
July 7, 2026
Credit: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/SLAC/AURA
Rubin’s 1.7-gigapixel image of a field of stars within the constellation Lupus gives us an unprecedented view of the Universe. Faint, glowing clouds spread across this image are galactic cirrus—clouds of interstellar gas and dust found in the foreground of the Milky Way.
June 30, 2026
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Following the Photons: A Photonics Podcast
June 30, 2026
Working principle of the Fourier-optics-based angle-resolved imaging spectrometer.
June 25, 2026
Credit: Cirrus Logic
Bringing signal conversion closer to the sensor unlocks new performance gains.
June 25, 2026
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Following the Photons: A Photonics Podcast
June 23, 2026
FIGURE 1. Right panel: Process Engineer Catherine Nguyen of Thorlabs holds the first produced 8-in. AlGaAs crystalline supermirror. Scaling the mirrors to large size is necessary to be used in gravitational wave detectors. The inset diagram shows the face-centered cubic zincblende structure of GaAs. In this depiction of a unit cell, gallium anions are blue and arsenic cations are red. In alternating layers of the coating, some of the gallium atoms are replaced by aluminum, resulting in the ternary alloy AlxGa1-xAs (AlGaAs) where x is the Al mole fraction, which has a lower refractive index than GaAs. Left panel: Schematic of the crystalline coating process. A GaAs/AlGaAs epitaxial Bragg mirror is grown on a base GaAs growth wafer, which is in turn directly bonded to the optical substrate (in this case comprising super-polished fused silica). Bonding is realized using a plasma-activated process, with a modest (<150°C) post-contact anneal. The GaAs growth wafer is then selectively removed via wet chemical etching, leaving the transferred epitaxial Bragg structure on the final optic.
June 22, 2026
Yu-Jie Lin (left) holds the metalens the group developed, and Professor Zhiwen Liu is on his right.
June 17, 2026

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