Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

Volume 5 Issue 8, August 2011

Strong, single-cycle terahertz pulses can be used to control interlayer superconductivity in a cuprate superconductor.

Letter by A. Dienst et al.

IMAGE: A. DIENST, M. C. HOFFMANN, D. FAUSTI, J. C. PETERSEN, S. PYON, T. TAKAYAMA, H. TAKAGI AND A. CAVALLERI

Editorial

  • Advertisement

Top of page ⤴

Commentary

  • India has long been active in the field of photonics, dating back to famous scientists such as Raman and Bose. Today, India is home to numerous research groups and telecommunications companies that own a sizeable amount of the fibre-optic links installed around the globe.

    • Bishnu Pal
    Commentary
Top of page ⤴

Research Highlights

Top of page ⤴

News & Views

  • Wavelength-tunable ultraviolet light sources are required for a wide range of applications, but are typically difficult to manufacture and operate. A simple gas-filled optical fibre that performs efficient frequency conversion from the infrared to the deep-ultraviolet could be a promising answer.

    • Zhipei Sun
    • Andrea C. Ferrari
    News & Views
  • A superlattice comprising alternating layers of negative-refractive-index photonic crystals and positive-refractive-index dielectric media has been shown to exhibit an effective refractive index of zero. Experiments show that light passing through such a material experiences no phase shift.

    • Jörg Schilling
    News & Views
  • The interaction between atoms in a Bose–Einstein condensate and plasmon-enhanced fields is a step towards the goal of realizing hybrid atom–polariton systems for tasks in quantum information processing.

    • James P. Shaffer
    News & Views
  • Photonic quasicrystals are specially designed aperiodic materials that possess long-range order and are capable of transmitting light. Contrary to intuition, introducing disorder can be used to enhance the propagation of light through such labyrinth structures.

    • Z. Valy Vardeny
    • Ajay Nahata
    News & Views
  • The controlled 'catch and release' of individual quantum-information-carrying photons is an important ingredient for achieving scalable quantum networking. Recently, researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics succeeded in this task in two separate systems.

    • David L. Moehring
    • Boris B. Blinov
    News & Views
  • Ångström-scale lasing from SACLA in Japan — the world's second hard-X-ray free-electron laser facility — marks a new era in X-ray photonics.

    • David Pile
    News & Views
Top of page ⤴

Editorial

Top of page ⤴

Business News

Top of page ⤴

Research Highlights

Top of page ⤴

Profile

  • Over the past ten years, Crystal Fiber, now part of NKT Photonics, has been busy commercializing photonic crystal fibre. Nadya Anscombe finds out about the evolution of the technology and its applications.

    • Nadya Anscombe
    Profile
Top of page ⤴

Industry Perspective

  • Important developments in fibre technology now allow the realization of fibre lasers with reliable and stable single-mode operation at power levels beyond 1 kW.

    • Bryce Samson
    • Adrian Carter
    • Kanishka Tankala
    Industry Perspective
  • The photosensitive optical fibre — a work-horse of the telecommunications industry for many years — is now seeing rapid uptake in the sensor and laser industries.

    • Andy Gillooly
    Industry Perspective
  • Twisting and microforming an optical fibre provides it with unique chiral properties that are useful for polarization control, harsh-environment sensing and dense multichannel coupling to photonic integrated circuits.

    • Victor I. Kopp
    • Azriel Z. Genack
    Industry Perspective
Top of page ⤴

Product Highlights

Top of page ⤴

Interview

  • Chalcogenide glasses are attracting significant attention thanks to their mid-infrared transparency and highly nonlinear properties. Nadya Anscombe talks to Dan Hewak from the University of Southampton in the UK.

    • Nadya Anscombe
    Interview
Top of page ⤴

Letter

Top of page ⤴

Article

  • Researchers have fired ultracold-atom Bose–Einstein condensates towards the submicrometre-featured potentials formed by the optical near-fields of surface plasmons. The strength and structural dependence of the optical near-fields were determined from the reflection of cold atoms. It is hoped that the work paves the way towards plasmonic guiding and the manipulation of cold atoms.

    • Christian Stehle
    • Helmar Bender
    • Sebastian Slama
    Article
  • Researchers experimentally demonstrate that light propagating through a path-averaged zero-index dielectric medium can have zero phase delay, despite a non-zero physical path length. The medium is a superlattice consisting of layers of negative-refractive-index dielectric photonic crystals and positive-refractive-index homogeneous dielectric media.

    • S. Kocaman
    • M. S. Aras
    • C. W. Wong
    Article
Top of page ⤴

Interview

  • The use of intense ultrafast terahertz pulses to gate superconductivity not only provides insights into charge transport in such materials but may also lead to new forms of data switching, explains Andrea Cavalleri.

    • Noriaki Horiuchi
    Interview
Top of page ⤴

Focus

  • Optical fibres are getting sophisticated and proving to have important roles in applications beyond telecommunications.

    Focus
Top of page ⤴

Search

Quick links