Optical filter sorts light by its ‘quantum statistics’

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15 July 2026 Optical filter sorts light by its ‘quantum statistics’ A nanostructured gold surface can filter light depending on the tendency of its photons to arrive at a detector in pairs. By Sebastian Golat ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3947-7634 0 Sebastian Golat Sebastian Golat is in the Department of Physics, Kings College London, London WC2R 2LS, UK. View author publications PubMed Google Scholar

Whether a beam of light will pass through an object often depends on the object’s material and on properties of the light, such as its frequency, colour and polarization. These properties can be assigned to individual photons, but some characteristics of light emerge only collectively, through quantum correlations between many photons. The development of materials that manipulate these collective properties has been a substantial challenge, but writing in Nature, You et al.1 report a nanostructured material that can filter light according to its ‘quantum statistics’ — which describe how the arrivals of photons at detectors are correlated with each other.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-02038-x

References You, C. et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10782-3 (2026). Mouloudakis, G. & Lambropoulos, P. Phys. Rev. A 97, 053413 (2018). Romero, E. et al. Nature Phys. 10, 676–682 (2014). Download references

Competing Interests The author declares no competing interests.

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