Optical sensors articles from across Nature Portfolio

A photonic force microscope has been developed with a trapped lanthanide-doped crystal detecting forces as small as 110 aN. This opens new prospects for force sensing in the physical sciences.

A ring laser gyroscope, located at the Geodetic Observatory Wettzell in Southern Germany, measures variations in the Earth’s rotation. Nature Photonics spoke to a key researcher on the project, Ulrich Schreiber, about the system’s birth, teething issues, and how it may one day probe the El Niño effect.

At the University of Oklahoma, we developed a high-performance mid-infrared photonic sensing solution for the deployment of a scalable, continuous monitoring network for methane emissions in the Anadarko Basin, one of the largest oil and gas production basins in the USA.

Hybrid Rayleigh-Brillouin-Raman distributed sensing system: Coded pulse pairs are employed for simultaneously measuring vibration, strain and temperature distributions, through an optimized detection scheme of Rayleigh, Brillouin, and Raman scatterings.