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The basic effect of the earth's atmospheric refraction on telescope operation is the reduction of the true zenith angle to the apparent zenith angle, associated with prismatic aberrations due to the dispersion in air. If one attempts…
Twisted atomic bilayers are emerging platforms for manipulating chiral light-matter interaction at the extreme nanoscale, due to their inherent magnetoelectric responses induced by the finite twist angle and quantum interlayer coupling…
Colloidal crystals are of extreme importance for applied research, such as photonic crystals technology, and for fundamental studies in statistical mechanics. Long range attractive interactions, such as capillary forces, can drive the…
Water confined between two graphene layers with a small separation forms a two-dimensional ice structure,with an apparent square symmetry [Algara-Siller et al., Nature (London) 519, 443 (2015)], which is poorly understood. A density…
The scattering of light by water droplets can produce one of the most beautiful phenomena in Nature: the rainbow. This optical phenomenon has analogues in molecular, atomic and nuclear physics. Recently, rainbow scattering has been shown to…
The displacement of star images by atmospheric refraction observed by an Earth-bound telescope is dominated by a familiar term proportional to the product of the tangent of the zenith angle by the refractivity at the ground. The manuscript…
The advent of transformation optics has lead to the initiation of designing devices and applications associated to electromagnetic wave propagation in anisotropic media. Here, a method is suggested using a coordinate transformation with…
In this paper it is explained the construction and utility of a didactic exhibit about the effect of aerosol in atmosphere on electromagnetic wave propagation. The exhibit is composed by a lamp simulating the Sun, a Plexiglas case (the…
Artificial thin glass opals can be infiltrated with a resonant alkali-metal vapour, providing novel types of hybrid systems. The reflection at the interface between the substrate and the opal yields a resonant signal, which exhibits…
Quasicrystals are long-range ordered and yet non-periodic. This interplay results in a wealth of intriguing physical phenomena, such as the inheritance of topological properties from higher dimensions, and the presence of non-trivial…
Based on the convex hull construction algorithm, a new geometrical model of ice crystals is proposed to investigate the scattering properties of cirrus clouds particles. Light scattering matrices involving complete polarization information…
Analogue experiments have attracted interest for their potential to shed light on inaccessible domains. For instance, `dumb holes' in fluids and Bose-Einstein condensates, as analogues of black holes, have been promoted as means of…
The refraction of light by dispersion-free dielectric media can be modeled using well-localized macroscopic wave packets, enabling a description in terms of pseudo-particles. This approach is often used in thought experiments to illustrate…
Motivated by a problem from the 2023 International Physicists' Tournament, we investigate the formation of particular patterns when light passes through glass. Experimentally, we use various glass plates, registering each reflected and…
We apply a framework for the description of random tilings without height representation, which was proposed recently, to the special case of quasicrystalline random tilings. Several important examples are discussed, thereby demonstrating…
We applied the transformation optics to mimic a black hole of Schwarzschild form. Similar properties of photon sphere were also found numerically for the metamaterial black hole. Several reduced versions of the black hole systems were…
Natural materials typically interact weakly with the magnetic component of light which greatly limits their applications. This has led to the development of artificial metamaterials and metasurfaces. However, natural atoms, where only…
The interaction of electrical fields and liquids can lead to phenomena that defies intuition. Some famous examples can be found in Electrohydrodynamics as Taylor cones, whipping jets or non-coalescing drops. A less famous example is the…
In recent times, we experimentally realized a quite efficient modeling of the shape of diffraction-resistant optical beams; thus generating for the first time the so-called Frozen Waves (FW), whose longitudinal intensity pattern can be…
Optical methods are most convenient to analyze spatially periodic patterns with wavevector $\bm q$ in a thin layer of a nematic liquid crystal. In the standard experimental setup a beam of parallel light with a 'short' wavelength $\lambda…