Volume 12 Issue 9, September 2018

Individual, light-emitting nanoparticles offer many opportunities for early disease detection. Now, advances towards greatly enhanced brightness are being made using core–multi-shell architectures.

Exploiting an optical cavity that folds space in time in a conventional lens design provides a novel route for time-resolved imaging and depth sensing.

The parameters and issues that affect the accuracy of fluorescence molecular imaging are discussed and a means for ensuring reliable reproduction of the fluorescence signals in biological tissue is proposed.

This Review covers recent progress in quantum technologies with optically addressable solid-state spins. A possible path to chip-scale quantum technologies through advances in nanofabrication, quantum control and materials engineering is described.

Spin-polarized photon absorption and photoluminescence are reported in reduced-dimensional chiral perovskite materials. The finding indicates that such materials may in the future be useful as a photonic interface for spintronics.

A fully programmable two-qubit quantum processor with more than 200 components is demonstrated by using silicon photonic circuits. A two-qubit quantum approximate optimization algorithm and simulation of Szegedy quantum walks are implemented.

A metalens is integrated into the design of an endoscopic optical coherence tomography catheter to achieve near-diffraction-limited imaging free of non-chromatic aberrations, offering high-resolution imaging well beyond the Rayleigh range of the input field.

This systematic study of upconversion nanoparticles reveals power-dependent luminescence and paves the way towards ideal single-molecule and cellular probes.

Broadband terahertz (THz) pulses are generated from a laser filament with a near-infrared laser at the fundamental frequency and its second harmonic. The azimuthal angle and ellipticity of the THz pulses are arbitrarily controlled by the two lasers.

By folding large spaces in time using an off-resonant Fabry–Pérot cavity in camera sensors, new capabilities such as ultrafast multi-zoom imaging and ultrafast multispectral imaging, of use for time-resolved imaging and depth-sensing optics, are found.