Dragomir Neshev

An ordinary lens always refracts light the same way. Its properties are frozen in glass forever. But now there's a surface that changes the game on the fly. Scientists made an ultrathin film with resonant elements and infused it with liquid crystals — the same stuff used in phone screens.

A thin film of molybdenum disulfide, less than a micron thick, acts as a miniature photon-pair factory built right into a fiber-optic connector. Ordinary optical fiber is not just a glass thread for the internet.