News & Views in 2019

Low-cost spectroscopy, mobile phone-based imaging and laser-processed paper sensors are all examples of how photonics could help tackle India’s healthcare and environmental monitoring challenges.

Orbital angular momentum is a property of light that has many emerging applications, but has been poorly appreciated until recently. The wavelength frontier of orbital angular momentum sources is extending beyond the ultraviolet thanks to research in fields ranging from nanostructures to free-electron lasers.

Propagating on fibre links between multiple nodes of a network, light gets trapped by multi-path interference and forms complex states that are very sensitive to external perturbations. Now, a network of subwavelength, doped polymer fibres has been shown to operate as a network laser.

Integrated photonics could allow for the generation, manipulation and detection of quantum light on-chip, opening the path to a scalable, reliable platform for real-world deployment of quantum applications.

The demonstration of Pr³⁺-doped phosphors that exhibit persistent luminescence in the UVC region when exposed to X-rays not only expands the scope of afterglow phosphors, but also offers new opportunities for sensing and biomedicine.

Quantum correlations from photon antibunching enhance the resolution of image scanning microscopy in biological imaging by twofold, four times beyond the diffraction limit.

Using a single atom in a cavity to control a propagating optical pulse can deterministically create a Schrödinger-cat state — an intriguing quantum superposition of classically distinct states. The result is a new opportunity for quantum state engineering with potential applications in quantum networks and computation.