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The image shows a lightning strike being guided by a terawatt laser beam that is projected into the sky, near a tower on top of a mountain in Switzerland. The results are the first successful field trial of laser guidance of lightning outside of the lab.
Mordechai (Moti) Segev spoke with Nature Photonics about the fascinating topic of photonic time crystals — materials with a refractive index that is periodically modulated in time on ultrafast timescales — and their inspiring future ahead.
A field trial in the Swiss mountains demonstrating that an intense laser beam can guide lightning discharge over tens of metres gives hope for the development of a new form of mobile lightning protection.
X-ray photons emitted by free electrons travelling in van der Waals materials show energy shifts induced by quantum recoil, thus offering a viable route to generating tailored and tunable single X-ray photons.
A hyperspectral camera based on a random array of CMOS-compatible Fabry–Pérot filters is demonstrated. The hyperspectral camera exhibits performance comparable with that of a typical RGB camera, with 45% sensitivity to visible light, a spatial resolution of 3 px for 3 dB contrast, and a frame rate of 32.3 fps at VGA resolution.
Quantum recoil is experimentally observed via photon energy shifts in Smith–Purcell radiation. Leveraging van der Waals materials as atomic-scale gratings, the quantum recoil is measured at room temperature on a tabletop platform.
Researchers decreased the recombination rate in lead-halide perovskite thin films by using plasmonic mirrors and hyperbolic metamaterials. The findings led to a 250% photodetector photoresponsivity increase and may have implications for other optoelectronic devices.
Two-dimensional massive and massless Dirac fermions in HgTe/CdHgTe quantum wells yield terahertz Landau emission. The emission frequency is continuously tunable with magnetic field or carrier concentration, over the range from 0.5 to 3 THz.
A tunable terahertz radiation pulse is demonstrated based on a linear accelerator. The emission frequency of this terahertz radiation is tunable from 1 to 10 THz by changing the bunching frequency of a 34 MeV electron beam. The pulse energy is at the submillijoule level.