News and Views on “Thermally reconfigurable random lasers”
Light can control microparticles and microstructures can shape light, leading to a wide range of practical applications as well as interesting physics.
By combining optically controlled micro-heaters with thermophilic particles attracted by them researchers form University College London obtained microlasers with programmable and reversible patterns. This achievement is a nice demonstration of what happens when colloidal science meets photonics and is now published in Nature Physics and highlighted by Neda Ghofraniha in News and Views .