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The surface of a spinning liquid takes the shape of a paraboloid that can be used as a reflecting mirror. This very old and nearly forgotten concept has recently been revived and I review its present status. Extensive interferometric tests…
The gravitational lensing signal produced by a galaxy or a galaxy cluster is determined by its total matter distribution, providing us with a way to directly constrain their dark matter content. State-of-the-art numerical simulations…
It is generally believed that transformation optics based cloaking, besides rendering the cloaked region invisible to detection by scattering of incident waves, also shields the region from those same waves. We demonstrate a coupling…
We demonstrate a new practical approach for generating multicolour spiral-shaped beams. It makes use of a standard silica optical fibre, combined with a titled input laser beam. The resulting breaking of the fibre axial symmetry leads to…
Recently, it was demonstrated that active sources can be used to cloak any objects that lie outside the cloaking devices [Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{103}, 073901 (2009)]. Here, we propose that active sources can create illusion effects, so…
Mathematical diffraction theory is concerned with the diffraction image of a given structure and the corresponding inverse problem of structure determination. In recent years, the understanding of systems with continuous and mixed spectra…
Artificial gauge fields enable extending the control over dynamics of uncharged particles, by engineering the potential landscape such that the particles behave as if effective external fields are acting on them. Recent years have witnessed…
We have recently started to investigate 2D arrays of confocal lens pairs. Miniaturization of the lens pairs can make the array behave ray-optically like a homogeneous medium. Here we generalize the geometry of the lens pairs. These…
The physics potential of the next generation of Gamma Ray Telescopes in exploring the Gamma Ray Horizon is discussed. It is shown that the reduction in the Gamma Ray detection threshold might open the window to use precise determinations of…
Upcoming Stage-IV surveys will deliver measurements of distribution of matter with unprecedented precision, demanding highly accurate theoretical models for cosmological parameter inference. A major source of modeling uncertainty lies in…
Surface waves in classical fluids experience a rich array of black/white hole horizon effects. The dispersion relation depends on the characteristics of the fluid (in our case, water and silicon oil) as well as on the fluid depth and the…
Recent pulsed-power experiments have demonstrated the formation of astrophysically-relevant, differentially rotating plasmas [1]. Key features of the plasma flows are the discovery of a quasi-Keplerian rotation curve, the launching of…
Advances in micro-technology of the last years have made it possible to carry optics textbooks experiments over to atomic and molecular beams, such as diffraction by a double slit or transmission grating. The usual wave-optical approach…
We consider simple hydrodynamical models of galactic dark matter in which the galactic halo is a self-gravitating and self-interacting gas that dominates the dynamics of the galaxy. Modeling this halo as a sphericaly symmetric and static…
Nonlinear optical behavior of recently introduced surface plasmon toy black hole models has been considered. Physical realization of these models involves droplets of liquid on a metal surface, which supports propagation of surface…
Looking for the primary rainbow in starlight that is reflected by exoplanets appears to be a promising method to search for liquid water clouds in exoplanetary atmospheres. Ice water clouds, that consist of water crystals instead of water…
One of the main advantages of reciprocal bianisotropic metasurfaces is their capability to produce asymmetric scattering depending from which side they are illuminated and on the handedness of circularly polarized illuminations. For most…
This report models the refractive index above a telescope site by an atmosphere with exponential decay of the refractive index (susceptibility) as a function of altitude. The air is represented as a spherical hull around the surface. We…
In this work we examine refraction of light by computing full solutions to axion electrodynamics. We also allow for the possibility of an additional plasma component. We then specialise to wavelengths which are small compared to background…
Excitation of surface waves on conducting materials provides a near resistance-free interface capable of a material glissade either by plasmon forces or optical beam tractors. Analogous to an ice hockey rink, as proof of principle plasmon…