Professor David Andrews and his post-doctoral associate Dr David Bradshaw are currently featured on the Newsroom front page of the International Society for Optical Engineering website, for their work on the “Optical control of excited-state lifetimes”.

They explain how the fluorescence seen in a wide range of materials can be controlled by a laser beam, using a colour for which the materials are transparent. Astonishingly, although such beams might be expected to have no influence, they can affect the fluorescent emission while the laser beam emerges unchanged. “It is not so mysterious to a chemist”, says Prof Andrews, “because it is what catalysts do all the time. The unusual thing here is that the process and the catalyst are both made of light.”Along with potential analytical applications, their work suggests an all-optical switching device, as they proposed earlier this year in the top journal Physical Review.You can see the article here - http://spie.org/x40855.xml?highlight=x2400&ArticleID=x40855 and the PDF is here - http://spie.org/documents/Newsroom/Imported/003013/003013_10.pdf