Light: Science & Applications

Researchers have demonstrated the world’s first simultaneous generation of 3,070 optical vortices at megawatt-class peak power (58 MW). By reformulating Hermite–Gaussian to Laguerre–Gaussian mode conversion and implementing it through a compact multibeam interference architecture, the team achieved more than three orders of magnitude improvement in both vortex number and peak power. The work establishes a scalable framework for high-intensity structured-light generation.

Researchers from Osaka University show that the improvements in signal strength during surface-enhanced fluorescence and Raman spectroscopy can extend even through a nanoscale protective layer. This research may lead to significant improvements in the sensitivity of biosensors and the development of novel point-of-care diagnostics.

Existing colour systems, such as RGB and CYMK, are all text-based and require a large range of values to represent different colours, making them difficult to compute and time-consuming to convert. Recently, researchers from City University of Hong Kong (CityU) made a breakthrough by inventing an innovative colour system, called “C235”, based on prime numbers, enabling efficient encoding and effective colour compression. It can unify existing colour systems and has the potential to be applied in various applications, like designing an energy-saving LCD system and colourizing DNA codons.

A recent study, affiliated with South Korea's Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) has introduced a flexible and transparent solar cell, using silicon microwire composites.