Volume 10 Issue 7, July 2016

Engineering optical and acoustic modes in membrane silicon waveguides has now been used to demonstrate record high net Brillouin amplification in silicon. This technique enables new possible applications including silicon on-chip Brillouin amplification, Brillouin lasers, and Brillouin devices for signal processing.

Combining a photochromic molecule with a semiconducting polymer yields an organic non-volatile, multilevel memory with a current output that can be switched and controlled by light.

Evidence of strongly enhanced coupling of light with nuclei offers the potential to extend applied quantum optics to the hard X-ray regime.

Tight focusing of two light beams onto an organic molecule opens the way to coherent nonlinear interactions at the few-photon level.

By using a single-photon frequency converter based on quasi-phase-matched LiNbO₃, frequency-domain Hong–Ou–Mandel interference is demonstrated between a heralded single photon at 780 nm and a weak laser pulse at 1,522 nm in a single spatial mode.

Strong coupling between X-rays and matter excitations in arrays of alternating ⁵⁷Fe and ⁵⁶Fe layers is demonstrated. The results may open the door to X-ray quantum optics and strong coupling phenomena.

Photons are efficiently funnelled into a single molecule if they are nearly resonant with the sharp molecular transition. In this condition, the coherent nonlinear optical effect can be induced with only a few photons without high-finesse cavities.

Optomechanically coupled modes in a fibre laser cavity make it possible to generate and robustly store gigahertz-rate soliton sequences.

A custom-designed metamaterial mask helps improve the accuracy of microscopy of single fluorescent molecules.

Net Brillouin amplification is demonstrated in silicon with just 5 mW pumping. Greater than 5 dB amplification is achieved.

Tunable polarization control and a two-colour X-ray pump–X-ray probe operating mode are demonstrated at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS).

A technique to enhance optical absorption by platinum nanoparticles is exploited for driving photocatalytic redox reactions.

Ultrashort pulses covering the 1–30 THz range are generated from a W/CoFeB/Pt trilayer and originate from photoinduced spin currents, the inverse spin Hall effect and a broadband Fabry–Pérot resonance. The resultant peak fields are several 100 kV cm^–1.

Researchers demonstrate microwave phonon waveguide circuits and tunable delay and filter for microwave-photonics signals carried by 1,500 nm wavelength light.