Optics and Photonics News

1 week ago | optica-opn.org | Patricia Daukantas

The stereotypical robot consists of hard metal and plastic parts with a limited range of motion. Increasingly, researchers are designing robots made of softer materials capable of handling delicate tasks with wide-ranging, easily adaptable movements—and light can be an important component of such a system. Researchers in the United States have now developed a soft robotic arm that changes shape under the influence of laser light (Adv. Intell. Syst., doi:10.1002/aisy.202500045 ).

2 weeks ago | optica-opn.org | Patricia Daukantas

Physicians know it’s hard to tell bacteria where to go or what to do. But a new light-driven signaling method could guide interactions between certain microbes and their biological hosts. Researchers in Italy have demonstrated how to affect the interaction between antibiotics and microbes with a light-activated organic chemical that changes the electrical potential of bacterial membranes (Eur. Phys. J. Plus, doi:10.1140/epjp/s13360-025-06263-7).

3 weeks ago | optica-opn.org | Meeri Kim

A long-standing mystery of the sun has baffled scientists for decades: Why is the atmosphere of the sun so much hotter than its surface? While the temperature of the surface is about 6000 K, the sun’s outer atmosphere—known as the corona—can heat up to millions of kelvins. High–spatial resolution observations are critical for understanding the solar atmosphere and the physical processes that lead to coronal heating.

1 month ago | optica-opn.org | Edwin Cartlidge

Scientists working at one of the world's leading X-ray lasers have used very high pressures and temperatures to elucidate for the first time the liquid structure of one of the most common elements in the universe—carbon (Nature, doi: 10.1038/s41586-025-09035-6). They say that their result could improve the synthesis of novel materials and raise the efficiency of nuclear fusion reactions.

1 month ago | optica-opn.org | Meeri Kim

The field of paleoclimatology studies the climates from past geologic ages, before the invention of meteorological instruments. Similar to the way that paleontologists study fossils to gain insight into the prehistoric past, paleoclimatologists use environmental evidence such as ice cores to reconstruct Earth’s climate history. Researchers in China and the United States have developed an all-optical method for radiometric dating of ice samples up to 1.5 million years old (Nat.