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Quantum electrodynamics suggests that when exposed to sufficiently high laser intensities, a vacuum should start to behave like a weak nonlinear medium and support photonphoton scattering. Although this phenomenon has not yet been experimentally confirmed, Ben King and colleagues now describe an elegant experiment that should make observation possible.
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.
Could lasers directly driven by sunlight help address the planet's energy generation problems? Japanese scientists are optimistic, reports Duncan Graham-Rowe.
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.
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.
Researchers are proposing a new experiment that will probe fundamental aspects of the quantum vacuum by searching for highly elusive photon–photon scattering events.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.