Scientific journal Optics Letters, one of the most traditional and respected periodicals in the field of optics and photonics, turned 40 in July 2017 and celebrated the occasion by conducting a review of its contribution to the development of the field of physics. The journal prepared a ranking of the 100 scientific articles with the greatest impact (cited more times by other articles) in the history of the journal, selected from more than 100,000 articles published in the four decades of the journal. Four Brazilian researchers coauthored five of the articles on the select list. Vilson Rosa de Almeida, an electronics engineer with an undergraduate degree from the Technological Institute of Aeronautics (ITA), where he is a researcher, wrote three articles on how to confine and control light in nanometric structures, published while he was working on his PhD at Cornell University in the United States. Almeida coauthored two of the articles with physicist Roberto Panepucci from the Renato Archer Center for Information Technology in Campinas. Physicist Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz, FAPESP scientific director, wrote a fourth article. Cruz also has an undergraduate degree in electronics engineering from ITA, as well as a master’s and doctorate in physics from Unicamp. He prepared the article, in which he describes the production of ultrashort light pulses (that last femtoseconds), as a postdoctoral researcher at Bell Laboratories in the United States. Another Brazilian in the ranking is physicist Walter Margulis, a researcher in Sweden today, with an article from 1986 that showed that optical fibers can double the frequency of light.
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