Reviews & Analysis

Photonics West 2024 showcases a robust and growing photonics industry, as the field of silicon photonics works towards sustainable growth.

Metasurfaces bring miniaturization and new avenues for the generation, manipulation and measurement of quantum light.

With many exotic electromagnetic effects, metamaterials are now being exploited in real-world biomedical applications, with expected impacts in healthcare.

Photonics enables the design of ultrafast, energy-efficient computing approaches for artificial intelligence, and key to the scalability of such approaches is photonics integration.

The interaction of terahertz waves with novel materials is bringing rich physics and new opportunities for applications.

The laser community returned to Prague to celebrate science and to be connected, in person, again, while high-power lasers were in the limelight.

Progress in high-performance tandem solar cells and quantum cascade laser light sources were highlights of the Japan Society of Applied Physics Spring Meeting.

From biophotonics to chiral behaviour, research into organic LEDs is thriving and expanding into new areas.

Several research groups have now succeeded in achieving lasing in free-electron lasers (FELs) driven by compact plasma wakefield accelerators. In the future, the approach may ultimately lead to a new breed of much smaller, more affordable FELs.

Although optical communications continue to be the main driver for integrated photonics, new applications are emerging in computing and neural networks. That was the message from this year’s European Conference on Integrated Optics in Milan.

Time-varying metamaterials bring in an extra degree of freedom, enabling applications unachievable by normal metamaterials and opening up new opportunities.

Delegates at the BiOS symposium heard how artificial intelligence can transform medical imaging, with its ability to improve quality, speed and molecular specificity.

Registration fees, travel costs and visas, and time away from home and the lab, are all factors that can make attending scientific meetings in person difficult. Can online conferences provide a solution?

Dielectric antennas and metasurfaces open up new opportunities for future applications in advanced optoelectronics, light detection and ranging for autonomous vehicles, fluorescence-enhancing substrates for bioimaging and many more.