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Scanning electron microscope image of a portion of a centimetre-long spiral silicon nanowire. Inside the nanowire, infrared light strongly couples to microwave sound. The waveguide confines light by total internal reflection and confines sound by impedance mismatch.
Quantum physics and gravitational physics remain separate due to the vastly different scales of time and space that they refer to. Now, research may point to links between them.
A fibre probe that relies on frequency mixing in a nonlinear crystal provides an all-optical scheme for mapping the amplitude and phase of terahertz fields.
The introduction of periodic inversion in the geometry of a plasmonic metasurface markedly boosts the efficiency of nonlinear processes in ultracompact structures.
A discrete-variable quantum key distribution system that is capable of distributing a provably-secure cryptographic key over 307 kilometres is demonstrated at a telecom wavelength.
A theoretical proposal for time-dependent deflection of X-rays by gravitational and relativistic effects may lead to a table-top technique for probing gravity and relativity.
Nonlinearity engineering is demonstrated by the construction of metamaterial-based photonic crystals. Nonlinear emission and diffraction are controlled and intense focusing is reported.
A pair of 87Sr optical lattice clocks with a statistical agreement of 2 × 10−18 within 6,000 s has been developed. To this end, the behaviour of the blackbody radiation—a major perturbation for optical lattice clocks—was directly investigated.
The authors experimentally and theoretically demonstrate stimulated Brillouin scattering in a silicon nanowire supported by a pillar, which results from the tight confinement of both photons and phonons.