Whether a beam of light will pass through an object often depends on the object’s material and on properties of the light, such as its frequency, colour and polarization. These properties can be assigned to individual photons, but some characteristics of light emerge only collectively, through quantum correlations between many photons. The development of materials that manipulate these collective properties has been a substantial challenge, but writing in Nature, You et al.1 report a nanostructured material that can filter light according to its ‘quantum statistics’ — which describe how the arrivals of photons at detectors are correlated with each other.

Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.