Nobel Prize laureate for experiments with quantum-entangled photons, Professor Alain Aspect, visited the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences. At the FZU headquarters in Prague, he delivered a lecture titled "From Einstein and Bell to Quantum Technologies: Entanglement in Action". Three representatives from the Joint Laboratory of Optics of Palacký University and the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences attended both the lecture and the subsequent discussion.

Professor Rene A. Ong, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles, specializing in research in the field of astro-particle physics and high-energy astrophysics, visited the Joint Laboratory of Optics. Professor Ong currently serves as a co-spokesman for the CTA (Cherenkov Telescope Array) consortium, in which the Joint Laboratory of Optics is also involved.

The group of quantum and nonlinear optics at the Joint Laboratory of Optics deals long-term with twin beams that became an important tool for quantum optics as they exhibit quantum correlations and entanglement. A. Aspect, J. Clauser, and A. Zeilinger were awarded 2022 Nobel prize for physics for experiments with entangled photons. Quantum correlations cause that the results of measurements of properties of paired photons are not independent but bound together at a distance with invisible ties unparalleled in classical physics. This is why we call the paired photons nonclassical light.

The Laser Speckle Laboratory in the Joint Laboratory of Optics has developed a non-invasive method for monitoring plants' responses to induced stress. Speckle is a phenomenon in which the matt (optically rough) surface of an object is illuminated by a coherent laser beam and the reflected light field shows a typical speckled pattern caused by interference of light reflected off different points of the object. The pattern of the reflected light field (speckle field) is sensitive to the object movements and deformations and thus allows the changes that the surface of the object undergoes to be precisely tracked. The speckle effect also arises when the laser beam passes through a translucent object.