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As AI becomes embedded in modern life, the hardware powering it is running up against its physical limits. Meanwhile, its energy consumption is straining energy grids and increasing scrutiny over AI's environmental footprint. Engineers are racing to find more energy-efficient approaches to AI hardware, and light-based, or photonic, technologies offer promising alternatives. Using light to perform certain computations could lead to more efficient AI, which would reduce its ene

“We’ve now developed a wafer-scale process that produces wafers that are mechanically flexible and optically transparent, enabling novel applications that weren’t previously possible with silicon photonics,” says Jelena Notaros. Image: Courtesy of the researchers The field of silicon photonics, which uses light rather than electricity to transmit and process data on semiconductor chips, has enabled optical systems to evolve from bulky setups to compact and advanced systems. T

Cover illustration showing a gold nanostar illuminated by laser light. The nanostar amplifies the light emitted by proteins in a cell membrane, making them easier to detect, and influencing the dynamics of the proteins so they respond faster to electrical signals. Illustration by Noemi Rosano. Copyright: 2026 Wiley-VCH GmbH Researchers at Delft University of Technology have demonstrated for the first time that nano-antennas can enhance the fluorescence of proteins in living h

In this study, researchers developed an ultrafast infrared near-field optical microscopy technique that combines nanoscale spatial resolution and an approximately 150-femtosecond temporal resolution with a spectral resolution of about 10 cm⁻¹.

Credit: Caltech Three years after a team of Caltech scientists showed that pairs of entangled photons could double the resolution of a light microscope, the same lab has figured out a way to double down on that improvement. They have now achieved a fourfold resolution boost compared to a classical microscope, using a new optical design that sends one of the entangled photons through the microscope's optics three times rather than just once. The work, led by Lihong Wang, the B

Researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China have demonstrated skin mode tunability in photonic Floquet lattices. A potential applied at one boundary isolates a skin mode at the opposite boundary, turning it into a self-healing state that recovers its profile after disturbance. The approach enables control of non-Hermitian wave dynamics for mode routing and optical switching. Published in PhotoniX.