Phys.org  April 22, 2023 Specifically tailored refractive index of light modifications, directly manufactured inside glass using a short pulsed laser, enable an almost arbitrary control of the light flow. However, the stringent requirements for quantitative knowledge of these modifications, as well as for fabrication precision, have so far prevented the fabrication of light-efficient aperiodic photonic volume elements (APVEs). An international team of researchers (Austria, Germany, UK) has developed a powerful approach to the design and manufacturing of light-efficient APVEs. They optimized application-specific three-dimensional arrangements of hundreds of thousands of microscopic voxels and manufactured them using femtosecond direct laser writing inside […]