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Volume 4 Issue 2, February 2010

Quantum electrodynamics suggests that when exposed to sufficiently high laser intensities, a vacuum should start to behave like a weak nonlinear medium and support photon–photon scattering. Although this phenomenon has not yet been experimentally confirmed, Ben King and colleagues now describe an elegant experiment that should make observation possible.

Cover design by Tom Wilson.

Letter by Ben King et al.

Editorial

  • The recent explosion of e-readers onto the market, along with the news that Amazon is now selling more e-books than physical copies, suggests that our reading habits are finally changing.

    Editorial

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Out of the lab

  • Could lasers directly driven by sunlight help address the planet's energy generation problems? Japanese scientists are optimistic, reports Duncan Graham-Rowe.

    • Duncan Graham-Rowe
    Out of the lab
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Research Highlights

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News & Views

  • Researchers from Princeton and Northwestern Universities have independently demonstrated, through different design strategies, mid-infrared quantum cascade lasers with wall-plug efficiencies reaching 50%. The result is a quantum cascade laser so efficient that it generates more light than heat, albeit at low temperatures of operation.

    • Hui Chun Liu
    News & Views
  • Japan's new government has reversed its decision for research funding and angered many scientists in the process as budgets — including those for photonics research — get cut.

    • Ichiko Fuyuno
    News & Views
  • Researchers are proposing a new experiment that will probe fundamental aspects of the quantum vacuum by searching for highly elusive photon–photon scattering events.

    • Mattias Marklund
    News & Views
  • Micrometre-sized atomic vapour cells hosting robust entangled atomic states at room temperature offer a promising route to the realization of quantum photonic devices such as quantum gates and single-photon sources.

    • Jan-Michael Rost
    News & Views
  • Surface plasmons hold great promise for on-chip miniaturization of all-optical circuits, but practical methods of switching them are needed. Researchers have now demonstrated strong — and potentially fast — modulation of plasmons using a magnet.

    • Shanhui Fan
    News & Views
  • The demonstration of an LED made from a single electrostatically doped carbon nanotube p–n junction with dramatically improved light-emission efficiency marks an important advance for carbon nanotube photonics.

    • Tobias Hertel
    News & Views
  • The use of silicon photonics has now enabled the creation of 60-GHz microwave waveforms with programmable amplitude, frequency and phase.

    • Jianping Yao
    News & Views
  • The adoption of sophisticated phase-shift modulation schemes could make optical communication at 100 Gbit s−1 a reality within the next couple of years, but this is ultimately dependent on the deployment costs involved.

    • Rachel Won
    News & Views
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Correction

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Review Article

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Letter

  • A matterless double-slit scenario is proposed, in which photons generated from head-on collisions between a probe laser field and two ultraintense laser beams form a double-slit interference pattern. Such electromagnetic fields are predicted to induce material-like behaviour in a vacuum, supporting elastic scattering between photons.

    • Ben King
    • Antonino Di Piazza
    • Christoph H. Keitel
    Letter
  • A quantum cascade laser with a wall-plug efficiency of up to 50% is experimentally realized when operated at low temperatures and in pulsed mode. The high-efficiency performance is achieved by implementing an ultrastrong coupling between the injector and active regions.

    • Peter Q. Liu
    • Anthony J. Hoffman
    • Claire F. Gmachl
    Letter
  • A mid-infrared quantum cascade laser that emits more light than heat and features a high wall-plug efficiency of up to 53% when operated a temperature of 40 K is reported. The device utilizes a single-well injector design.

    • Yanbo Bai
    • Steven Slivken
    • Manijeh Razeghi
    Letter
  • The generation of spatiotemporal optical wave packets that are resistant to both dispersion and diffraction are attractive for bioimaging applications and plasma physics. By combining Bessel beams in the transverse plane with temporal Airy pulses, scientists now report the first observation of a class of versatile three-dimensional linear light ‘bullets’.

    • Andy Chong
    • William H. Renninger
    • Frank W. Wise
    Letter
  • Active switching of plasmons by an external magnetic field is demonstrated in a metal–ferromagnet–metal structure. The strong modulation, combined with possible all-optical magnetization reversal induced by femtosecond light pulses, opens the door to ultrafast magneto-plasmonic switching.

    • Vasily V. Temnov
    • Gaspar Armelles
    • Rudolf Bratschitsch
    Letter
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Article

  • Rydberg blockade — the suppression of excitation of more than one Rydberg atom within a blockade volume — has so far been realized using ultracold atoms. Now, scientists show that coherence times of >100 ns are achievable with coherent Rydberg atomic spectroscopy in micrometre-sized thermal vapour cells, making them good candidates for investigating low-dimensional strongly interacting Rydberg gases, constructing quantum gates and building single-photon sources.

    • H. Kübler
    • J. P. Shaffer
    • T. Pfau
    Article
  • Ultrabroad-bandwidth radiofrequency pulses that increase data transmission rate and allow multipath tolerance in wireless communications are difficult to generate using chip-based electronics. Now, a chip-scale fully programmable spectral shaper consisting of cascaded multichannel micro-ring resonators is demonstrated as a solution.

    • Maroof H. Khan
    • Hao Shen
    • Minghao Qi
    Article
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Corrigendum

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Product Focus

  • Optical parametric oscillators simultaneously generate two beams of coherent light that are widely tunable in wavelength. This flexibility makes them a popular tool in various areas of scientific research, reports Neil Savage.

    • Neil Savage
    Product Focus
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Interview

  • Generating 3D light packets that propagate without dispersing in time or space is not an easy task. Andy Chong from Cornell University told Nature Photonics how he and his co-workers came up with a simple and versatile approach to this problem.

    • Rachel Won
    Interview
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