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Twistoptics--A new way to control optical nonlinearity
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IMAGE: An illustration of the chain-reaction process that underlies the photon avalanching mechanism Columbia Engineering researchers have realized in their nanoparticles. In this process, the absorption of a single low-energy photon. view more
Credit: Miko?aj ?ukaszewicz/ Polish Academy of Sciences
New York, NY January 13, 2021 Researchers at Columbia Engineering report today that they have developed the first nanomaterial that demonstrates photon avalanching, a process that is unrivaled in its combination of extreme nonlinear optical behavior and efficiency. The realization of photon avalanching in nanoparticle form opens up a host of sought-after applications, from real-time super-resolution optical microscopy, precise temperature and environmental sensing, and infrared light detection, to optical analog-to-digital conversion and quantum sensing.
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IMAGE: At left: Experimental PASSI (photon avalanche single-beam super-resolution imaging) images of thulium-doped avalanching nanoparticles separated by 300 nanometers. At right: PASSI simulations of the same material. view more
Credit: Berkeley Lab and Columbia University
Since the earliest microscopes, scientists have been on a quest to build instruments with finer and finer resolution to image a cell s proteins - the tiny machines that keep cells, and us, running. But to succeed, they need to overcome the diffraction limit, a fundamental property of light that long prevented optical microscopes from bringing into focus anything smaller than half the wavelength of visible light (around 200 nanometers or billionths of a meter) - far too big to explore many of the inner-workings of a cell.