Volume 9 Issue 9, September 2015

SESAME is a 2.5 GeV third-generation light source under construction in Jordan. Commissioning will begin in the second half of next year, assuming the funding that is still needed can be found.

Electrically driven antennas are ubiquitous at radio frequencies, but frequency generators cannot reach optical frequencies. Quantum shot noise from inelastic tunnelling may provide the solution.

The discovery of a new nonlinear light propagation regime in optical fibres paves the way to spectrally brighter lasers and control of signal distortion in communication links.

Turning living cells into miniature lasers offers new opportunities for cell labelling, tracking and sensing on a grand scale.

Methods of nonlinear time series analysis shed new light on the nature and predictability of extreme events.

Optical scattering limits the ability to image or focus beneath one millimetre of tissue in biomedical optics. This Review summarizes recently developed 'guidestar' mechanisms that provide feedback for intra-tissue focusing.

Cells are transformed into self-contained, individual lasers with customizable emission properties via the injection of suitable fluorescent dyes and lipids or beads.

Using squeezed states of light combined with a real-time Bayesian adaptive estimation algorithm, deterministic phase estimation with a precision beyond the quantum shot noise limit is demonstrated without any prior knowledge of the phase's value.

Researchers demonstrate an electrically driven nanoscale transmitter based on the broadband quantum shot noise of electrons tunnelling across a feed gap.

Researchers exploit direct stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy and dedicated detection of super-critical-angle fluorescence emission to enable direct optical nanoscopy with axially localized detection.

Dark pulse combs are formed in normal-dispersion microresonators with mode-interaction-assisted excitation, increasing freedom in microresonator design and potentially extending Kerr comb generation into the visible wavelength regime.

Plasmon-induced resonance energy transfer is revealed and explored for solar energy harvesting from visible and near-infrared light.

Self-parametric amplification, a nonlinear optical effect, is observed in optical fibre and results in optical spectrum narrowing and stable propagation.

A quantum simulation scheme is proposed for molecular vibronic spectra, a problem for which no efficient classical algorithm is currently known. The simulation is efficiently performed on a boson sampling machine simply by modifying the input state.