Supersonic/hypersonic flows involved with the high speed flight have received vast interests.Features of such flows like unsteadiness,intensive gradient and compressibility chal-lenge the ability of experimental methods.Nano-tracer planar laser scattering (NPLS)is a non-intrusive optic technique developed by the authors’group in 2005 ,which can visualize the tempo-ral-resolved flow structures in a cross-section of instantaneous three-dimensional supersonic flow with high spatiotemporal resolution.Many studies have demonstrated that NPLS is an effective technique for studying supersonic turbulence.In recent years,the authors have made great pro-gresses in supersonic turbulence study using NPLS.And several techniques based on NPLS have been developed,such as NPLS-based density technique (NPLS-DT),which helps to understand the density field of supersonic flows and obtain Reynolds stress distribution.This paper intro-duced NPLS technique for visualizing the fine structures of supersonic flows,and reviewed its ap-plications in supersonic boundary layer,shock/boundary layer interaction and so on.With its a-vailable application on measuring the flow static parameters such as Reynolds stress and turbulent kinetic energy,NPLS would contribute to the development of turbulence models for compressible flows .