A muon collider would enable the big jump ahead in energy reach that is needed for a fruitful exploration of fundamental interactions. The challenges of producing muon collisions at high luminosity and 10 TeV centre of mass energy are being investigated by the recently-formed International Muon Collider Collaboration. This Review summarises the status and the recent advances on muon colliders design, physics and detector studies. The aim is to provide a global perspective of the field and to outline directions for future work.

In this paper, we design and simulate VO₂/metal multilayers to obtain a large tunability of the thermal emissivity of infrared (IR) filters in the typical mid wave IR window of many infrared cameras. The multilayer structure is optimized to realise a low emissivity filter at high temperatures useful for military purposes. The values of tunability found for VO₂/metal multilayers are larger than the value for a single thick layer of VO₂.

The photodeflection method when applied to measure the low thermal diffusivity of some materials gives inconsistent results. In this article a way to extend the thermal diffusivity range of measurements using the phase of the photodeflection signal is presented. A comparison with computer simulations and experimental results shows good agreement.

Extrinsic or pseudo-chiral (meta)surfaces have an achiral structure, yet they can give rise to circular dichroism when the experiment itself becomes chiral. Although these surfaces are known to yield differences in reflected and transmitted circularly polarized light, the exact mechanism of the interaction has never been directly demonstrated. Here we present a comprehensive linear and nonlinear optical investigation of a metasurface composed of tilted gold nanowires. In the linear regime, we directly demonstrate the selective absorption of circularly polarised light depending on the orientation of the metasurface. In the nonlinear regime, we demonstrate for the first time how second harmonic generation circular dichroism in such extrinsic/pseudo-chiral materials can be understood in terms of effective nonlinear susceptibility tensor elements that switch sign depending on the orientation of the metasurface. By providing fundamental understanding of the chiroptical interactions in achiral metasurfaces, our work opens up new perspectives for the optimisation of their properties.

In situ XRD and IR optical measurements demonstrate the coexistence of M₁ and R phases during the SMT transition of VO₂ thin films.