Painting with light: Novel nanopillars precisely control intensity of transmitted light

EurekAlert  September 4, 2020
By shining white light on a glass slide stippled with millions of tiny titanium dioxide pillars, an international team of researchers (China, USA – NIST, University of Maryland) has reproduced luminous hues and subtle shadings of a painting. By adding or dropping a particular color, or wavelength, of light traveling in an optical fiber, scientists can control the amount of information carried by the fiber. By altering the intensity, researchers can maintain the brightness of the light signal as it travels long distances in the fiber. The approach has potential applications in improving optical communications and making currency harder to counterfeit…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE 

Schematics of the full-color nanopainting generation setup… CREDIT: Optica Vol. 7, Issue 9, pp. 1171-1172 (2020)