Tag Archives: The Starry Night (van Gogh)

Using sound to sculpt light for better displays and imaging

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A July 31, 2025 Stanford University news release (also on EurekAlert) describes a nanodevice that can sculpt light, Note: Links have been removed,

Light can behave in very unexpected ways when you squeeze it into small spaces. In a new paper in the journal Science, Mark Brongersma, a professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford University, and doctoral candidate Skyler Selvin describe the novel way they have used sound to manipulate light that has been confined to gaps only a few nanometers across – allowing the researchers exquisite control over the color and intensity of light mechanically.

The findings could have broad implications in fields ranging from computer and virtual reality displays to 3D holographic imagery, optical communications, and even new ultrafast, light-based neural networks.

The new device is not the first to manipulate light with sound, but it is smaller and potentially more practical and powerful than conventional methods. From an engineering standpoint, acoustic waves are attractive because they can vibrate very fast, billions of times per second. Unfortunately, the atomic displacements produced by acoustic waves are extremely small – about 1,000 times smaller than the wavelength of light. Thus, acousto-optical devices have had to be larger and thicker to amplify sound’s tiny effect – too big for today’s nanoscale world.

“In optics, big equals slow,” Brongersma said. “So, this device’s small scale makes it very fast.”

Simplicity from the start

The new device is deceptively simple. A thin gold mirror is coated with an ultrathin layer of a rubbery silicone-based polymer only a few nanometers thick. The research team could fabricate the silicone layer to desired thicknesses – anywhere between 2 and 10 nanometers. For comparison, the wavelength of light is almost 500 nanometers tip to tail.

The researchers then deposit an array of 100-nanometer gold nanoparticles across the silicone. The nanoparticles float like golden beach balls on an ocean of polymer atop a mirrored sea floor. Light is gathered by the nanoparticles and mirror and focused into the silicone between – shrinking the light to the nanoscale.

To the side, they attach a special kind of ultrasound speaker – an interdigitated transducer, IDT – that sends high-frequency sound waves rippling across the film at nearly a billion times a second. The high‑frequency sound waves (surface acoustic waves, SAWs) surf along the surface of the gold mirror beneath the nanoparticles. The elastic polymer acts like a spring, stretching and compressing as the nanoparticles bob up and down as the sound waves course by.

The researchers then shine light into the system. The light gets squeezed into the oscillating gaps between the gold nanoparticles and the gold film. The gaps change in size by the mere width of a few atoms, but it is enough to produce an outsized effect on the light.

The size of the gaps determines the color of the light resonating from each nanoparticle. The researchers can control the gaps by modulating the acoustic wave and therefore control the color and intensity of each particle.

“In this narrow gap, the light is squeezed so tightly that even the smallest movement significantly affects it,” Selvin said. “We are controlling the light with lengths on the nanometer scale, where typically millimeters have been required to modulate light acoustically.”

Starry, starry sky

When white light is shined from the side and the sound wave is turned on, the result is a series of flickering, multicolored nanoparticles against a black background, like stars twinkling in the night sky. Any light that does not strike a nanoparticle is bounced out of the field of view by the mirror, and only the light that is scattered by the particles is directed outward toward the human eye. Thus, the gold mirror appears black and each gold nanoparticle shines like a star.

The degree of optical modulation caught the researchers off guard. “I was rolling on the floor laughing,” Brongersma said of his reaction when Selvin showed him the results of his first experiments. “I thought it would be a very subtle effect, but I was amazed how much nanometer changes in distance can change the light scattering properties so dramatically.”

The exceptional tunability, small form factor, and efficiency of the new device could transform any number of commercial fields. One can imagine ultrathin video displays, ultra-fast optical communications based on acousto-optics’ high-frequency capabilities, or perhaps new holographic virtual reality headsets that are much smaller than the bulky displays of today, among other applications.

“When we can control the light so effectively and dynamically,” Brongersma said, “we can do everything with light that we could want – holography, beam steering, 3D displays – anything.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Acoustic wave modulation of gap plasmon cavities by Skyler P. Selvin, Majid Esfandyarpour, Anqi Ji, Yan Joe Lee, Colin Yule, Jung-Hwan Song, Mohammad Taghinejad and Mark L. Brongersma. Science 31 Jul 2025 Vol 389, Issue 6759 pp. 516-520 DOI: 10.1126/science.adv1728

This paper is behind a paywall.

The subhead ‘Starry, starry sky’ reminded me of a song by Don McLean, ‘Starry, Starry Night’, a lyrical tribute to Vincent van Gogh and his painting, ‘The Starry Night’. First, ‘Starry, starry sky’,

How the nanoparticles look with and without the surface acoustic wave (SAW) activation. Brongersma compared it to a starry night sky. | Selvin et al., Supplementary Movie 1 from “Acoustic wave modulation of gap plasmon cavities,” Science (2025), ©2025 AAAS; courtesy of the authors [downloaded from https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2025/07/nanoscale-device-control-light-sound-acoustic-waves-imaging-communications]

Next, ‘The Starry Night’,

By Vincent van Gogh – Google Arts & Culture — bgEuwDxel93-Pg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25498286

As for Don McLean’s song ‘Starry, Starry Night’, I leave that to you. In days gone by, I would have embedded a YouTube version of the song but the owners have turned that site into one long commercial occasionally interrupted by content.

van Gogh’s sky is alive with real-world physics

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Caption: The authors measured the relative scale and spacing of the whirling brush strokes in van Gogh’s “The Starry Night,” along with variances in luminance of the paint, to see if the laws that apply in the physics of real skies apply in the artist’s depiction. The results suggest van Gogh had an innate understanding of atmospheric dynamics. He captured multiple dimensions of atmospheric physics with surprising accuracy. Credit: Yinxiang Ma

A September 17, 2024 American Institute of Physics news release (also on EurekAlert) reveals how researchers in the fields of marine sciences and fluid dynamics have revealed the ‘hidden turbulence’ in van Gogh’s The Starry Night,

Vincent van Gogh’s painting “The Starry Night” depicts a swirling blue sky with yellow moon and stars. The sky is an explosion of colors and shapes, each star encapsulated in ripples of yellow, gleaming with light like reflections on water. 

Van Gogh’s brushstrokes create an illusion of sky movement so convincing it led atmospheric scientists to wonder how closely it aligns with the physics of real skies. While the atmospheric motion in the painting cannot be measured, the brushstrokes can.

In an article published this week in Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, researchers specializing in marine sciences and fluid dynamics in China and France analyzed van Gogh’s painting to uncover what they call the hidden turbulence in the painter’s depiction of the sky.

“The scale of the paint strokes played a crucial role,” author Yongxiang Huang said. “With a high-resolution digital picture, we were able to measure precisely the typical size of the brushstrokes and compare these to the scales expected from turbulence theories.”

To reveal hidden turbulence, the authors used brushstrokes in the painting like leaves swirling in a funnel of wind to examine the shape, energy, and scaling of atmospheric characteristics of the otherwise invisible atmosphere. They used the relative brightness, or luminance, of the varying paint colors as a stand-in for the kinetic energy of physical movement.

“It reveals a deep and intuitive understanding of natural phenomena,” Huang said. “Van Gogh’s precise representation of turbulence might be from studying the movement of clouds and the atmosphere or an innate sense of how to capture the dynamism of the sky.”

Their study examined the spatial scale of the painting’s 14 main whirling shapes to find out if they align with the cascading energy theory that describes the kinetic energy transfer from large- to small-scale turbulent flows in the atmosphere.

They discovered the overall picture aligns with Kolmogorov’s law, which predicts atmospheric movement and scale according to measured inertial energy. Drilling down to the microcosm within the paint strokes themselves, where relative brightness is diffused throughout the canvas, the researchers discovered an alignment with Batchelor’s scaling, which describes energy laws in small-scale, passive scalar turbulence following atmospheric movement.

Finding both scalings in one atmospheric system is rare, and it was a big driver for their research.

“Turbulence is believed to be one of the intrinsic properties of high Reynolds flows dominated by inertia, but recently, turbulence-like phenomena have been reported for different types of flow systems at a wide range of spatial scales, with low Reynolds numbers where viscosity is more dominant,” Huang said.

“It seems it is time to propose a new definition of turbulence to embrace more situations.”

Matthew Rozsa provides a more accessible description of the research in a September 20, 2024 article for Salon.com, Note: Links have been removed,

… one can look at “The Starry Night” and see a scientifically accurate representation of turbulent, cascading waters — a visual that may have directly inspired van Gogh before he transposed those dynamics into his iconic starry sky while painting in his mental asylum room in the French town of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.

“Imagine you are standing on a bridge, and you watch the river flow. You will see swirls on the surface, and these swirls are not random.” Yongxiang Huang, lead author of the study, told CNN. “They arrange themselves in specific patterns, and these kinds of patterns can be predicted by physical laws.”

Scientists fascinated by van Gogh’s art are not limited to physicists. When researchers discovered a gecko that reminded them of the paintings of van Gogh, they gave it the scientific name Cnemaspis vangoghi. As a common terms, the authors suggested “van Gogh’s starry dwarf gecko.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Hidden turbulence in van Gogh’s The Starry Night by Yinxiang Ma (马寅翔), Wanting Cheng (程婉婷), Shidi Huang (黄仕迪), François G. Schmitt, Xin Lin (林昕), Yongxiang Huang (黄永祥). Physics of Fluids Volume 36, Issue 9 September 2024 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0213627

This article is behind a paywall.