Volume 10 Issue 5, May 2016

A cavity design that makes it possible to directly generate Laguerre–Gaussian modes on demand looks set to benefit applications in microscopy and data communications.

Single crystals of perovskites are currently of interest to help fathom fundamental physical parameters limiting the performance of perovskite-based polycrystalline solar cells. Now, such perovskites offer a technology platform for optoelectronic devices, such as cheap and sensitive X-ray detectors.

A double-slit experiment performed with two rubidium atoms precisely held in an optical lattice inside an optical cavity provides a new platform for exploring quantum effects.

Optical forces are increasingly relevant in nanoscale optical science and engineering, but optical momentum in materials is still not fully understood. It is now shown that microstructure details as well as macroscopic optical parameters are important in determining optical momentum.

The prospects for light-emitting diodes and lasers based on perovskite materials are reviewed.

Unconventional interference and statistics of photon fields are studied using two-state ⁸⁷Rb atoms interacting with photons in an optical cavity. The observations are well described by the Tavis-Cummings model in the strong-coupling regime.

The growth of III–V quantum dot lasers directly onto a silicon substrate aids photonics and electronics integration.

Quantum cryptography immune from detector attacks is realized by the development of a source of indistinguishable laser pulses based on optically seeded gain-switched lasers. Key rates exceeding 1 Mb s⁻¹ are demonstrated in the finite-size regime.

Design and fabrication techniques that allow analogous dispersion control in chip-integrated optical microresonators are presented, allowing higher-order, wide-bandwidth dispersion control over an octave of spectrum.

Using time-stretch dispersive Fourier transform, scientists directly observe the spectro-temporal dynamics of the mode-locking transition on a single-shot basis over long record lengths of ∼900,000 consecutive pulses.

By exploiting geometric phase control inside a laser cavity to map polarization to orbital angular momentum, a new class of laser that is able to generate all states on the higher-order Poincaré sphere is reported.

Single-crystal perovskite devices 2–3 mm thick exhibit 16.4% X-ray detection efficiency with sensitivity four times higher than α-Se X-ray detectors.

A single photon with near-unity indistinguishability is generated from quantum dots in electrically controlled cavity structures. The cavity allows for efficient photon collection while application of an electrical bias cancels charge noise effects.

Scientists report a piezo-optomechanical circuit platform that combines localized and interacting 1,550 nm photons and 2.4 GHz phonons with photonic and phononic waveguides, enabling new devices for signal transduction between the optical, electrical and mechanical domains.