Volume 1 Issue 12, December 2007

A growing research and development sector is a sign of a healthy economy. South Africa hopes that a focus on photonics technologies will help drive the country's socio–economic development.

As the size of handheld gadgets decreases, their displays become harder to view. The solution could lie with integrated projectors that can project crisp, large images from mobile devices onto any chosen surface. Duncan Graham-Rowe reports.

The rapidly improved performance of LEDs based on multilayers of highly luminescent quantum dots could lead to promising applications in next-generation displays and lighting.

Optical coherence tomography is a powerful imaging technique. Thanks to work from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this technique just got faster and more powerful, with the potential to advance intricate imaging studies of the human body.

Devices emitting one photon at a time are a key component for quantum applications ranging from secure communication to more efficient computation. Recent advances in semiconductor-based single-photon devices bring such applications closer to reality.

Optical tweezers enable precise, controlled and non-contact manipulation of small biological specimens. Rather than using a bulky microscope, it is now possible to create optical tweezers at the end of a fibre probe.

Wavelength converters typically rely on inefficient nonlinear light–matter interactions or electro–optic effects. Researchers in the USA have now demonstrated a low-power and broadband all-optical wavelength shifter, which has the potential to fit on a single optical chip.

Textbooks suggest that heating, caused by phonon emission, is an inevitable and intrinsic by-product of light generation in a Raman laser. Now a design has emerged that reduces the phonon emission and may lead to higher efficiency and smaller devices.

A wide variety of photodetectors are available to suit applications spanning from telecommunications to single-photon counting. Neil Savage takes a look at some of the recent offerings.

Whatever format future quantum information systems take, they are likely to involve single photons in some way. Nature Photonics spoke to Stefan Strauf at the Stevens Institute of Technology about getting the most out of quantum dots.