“Photon Avalanche” created by Mikołaj Łukaszewicz and Artur Bednarkiewicz and submitted to the Foundry’s NanoArt Image contest by Bruce Cohen. Foundry users and scientists have created avalanching nanoparticles (ANPs), which exhibit true photon avalanching within a nanostructure at room temperature. ANPs have the most extreme non-linear optical response of any nanostructure and can be imaged in real time at deeply subwavelength resolutions using simple microscopy. The chain reaction-type light avalanching process is depicted in this artwork. ANPs will unlock a variety of optical applications from deeply sub-wavelength bioimaging to quantum sensing.
The artwork was an artistic rendering of work by Mikołaj Łukaszewicz and Artur Bednarkiewicz from the Institute of Low Temperature and Structure Research at Polish Academy of Sciences, Wroclaw, Poland, and Emory Chan and Bruce Cohen from the Molecular Foundry, published in Nature.