Volume 11 Issue 4, April 2017

The emission direction and timing of extreme-ultraviolet light can now be manipulated through an opto-optical approach that uses an infrared pulse to control the spatial and spectral phase of free induction decay resulting from atoms excited by attosecond light.

Combining attosecond science and nanophotonics potentially offers a route to enhance control over light–matter interactions at the nanoscale and provide a promising platform for information processing.

It has been revealed that simple anisotropic optical waveguides and the vectorial nature of electromagnetic waves can support a variety of bound states in the continuum akin to those introduced in quantum mechanics almost a century ago.

The principles and applications of optical elastography for use in biological imaging are reviewed.

The conversion of shaped near-infrared pulses to shaped, energetic, multi-octave-spanning mid-infrared pulses lasting as little as 1.2 optical cycles is made possible by adiabatic difference frequency generation.

The temporal structure of the polarization and carrier-envelope phase slip of high-harmonic waveforms generated in bulk gallium selenide within the duration of a single multi-terahertz driving pulse can be controlled by the crystal symmetry.

Existence conditions of bound states within the continuum of radiative modes are revealed for waveguides with anisotropic birefringent materials.

The Kerr effect in graded-index multimode fibres drives a spatial beam self-cleaning phenomenon that withstands fibre bending and does not necessitate dissipative processes such as stimulated scattering.

Terahertz (THz) pulses are generated by irradiating a metal wire with femtosecond laser pulses. For incident laser energy of 3 mJ, a THz pulse with energy of 28 μJ is obtained from a 10-cm-long wire. The spectrum of the THz pulse covers 0.1–1.5 THz.

A superconducting nanowire acting as a single-photon detector and as a microwave delay line is used to demonstrate an imaging device at the single-photon level with sub-20-µm spatial resolution and 50-ps temporal resolution.

The spatial phase and direction of extreme-ultraviolet light are controlled by an all-optical modulator based on argon gas. It works by using an infrared pulse to control the spatial and spectral phase of the free induction decay in the gas system.

Coherent diffractive imaging of periodic samples is demonstrated with a tabletop, 13.5 nm high-harmonic source. With a novel image reconstruction technique, the record high spatial resolution of 12.6 nm is achieved in the extreme-ultraviolet region.