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Volume 4 Issue 7, July 2010

Image of the surface of a photonic crystal laser that uses a carefully designed pattern of voids in the semiconductor to provide beamsteering capability.

Cover design by Tom Wilson.

Letter by Kurosaka et al.

Volume 4 Issue 7

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Editorial

  • Do you have a strong opinion or comment that you think would be valuable to share with the optics community? Then why not make use of our correspondence section.

    Editorial

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Correspondence

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Research Highlights

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News & Views

  • Frequency combs are created by stabilizing the evolution of the carrier–envelope phase of a mode-locked laser. Researchers have now demonstrated a simplified method of creating frequency combs that enables trains of identical pulses to be easily produced.

    • Steven T. Cundiff
    News & Views

  • A composite photonic crystal that allows on-chip control over the emission direction of a semiconductor laser diode looks set to benefit mobile projection displays, lasers printers and chip-to-chip optical communication.

    • Martin Kamp
    News & Views

  • High-performance, ultracompact lenses are needed in the quest to miniaturize optical systems. It now seems that carefully engineered subwavelength gratings can function as almost perfect mirrors with custom-designed focusing properties.

    • Lukas Chrostowski
    News & Views

  • Packets of light persisting in a continuously driven nonlinear resonator in the time domain offer new possibilities not only for applications in all-optical storage, pulse reshaping and wavelength conversion, but also for fundamental experiments in nonlinear science.

    • William Firth
    News & Views

  • A new gating scheme based on polarization control and second-harmonic generation is greatly simplifying the production of isolated attosecond pulses.

    • Thomas Pfeifer
    News & Views

  • Europe has always been a hub of innovation for photonics, and this year's Photonics Europe conference has shown that young inventors are still coming up with great ideas for commercialization.

    • Rachel Won
    News & Views
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Editorial

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Business News

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Research Highlights

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Profile

  • Developing new sensor technology requires knowledge from every area of science and engineering. Nadya Anscombe finds out how this is done at the National Centre for Sensor Research in Ireland.

    • Nadya Anscombe
    Profile
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Industry Perspective

  • A high-definition LIDAR system with a rotating sensor head containing 64 semiconductor lasers allows the efficient generation of 3D environment maps at unprecedented levels of detail.

    • Brent Schwarz
    Industry Perspective

  • Distributed fibre-optic sensors that rely on Brillouin scattering are being used by the oil and gas industries to keep their infrastructure safe and working properly.

    • Marc Niklès
    • Fabien Ravet
    Industry Perspective

  • A direct UV writing technique that can create multiple Bragg gratings and waveguides in a planar silica-on-silicon chip is enabling sensing applications ranging from individual disposable sensors for biotechnology through to multiplexed sensor networks in pharmaceutical manufacturing.

    • Sam Watts
    Industry Perspective
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Product Highlights

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Interview

  • The photonic sensors market is a diverse and fragmented one. David Krohn, chair of the Optoelectronics Industry Development Association's Photonic Sensor Consortium, tells Nadya Anscombe that the difference between success and failure often depends on understanding your market.

    • Nadya Anscombe
    Interview
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Review Article

  • The increasing capability for manufacturing a wide variety of optoelectronic devices from polymer and polymer–silicon hybrids, including transmission fibre, modulators, detectors and light sources, suggests that organic photonics has a promising future in communications and other applications.

    • Jenny Clark
    • Guglielmo Lanzani
    Review Article
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Letter

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Article

  • Using standard silica optical fibres, scientists observe temporal cavity solitons — packets of light persisting in a continuously driven nonlinear resonator. Cavity solitons 4 ps long are reported and used to demonstrate storage of a data stream for more than a second. The findings represent one of the simplest examples of self-organization phenomena in nonlinear optics.

    • François Leo
    • Stéphane Coen
    • Marc Haelterman
    Article

  • All-optical switching energies as small as 0.42 fJ — two orders of magnitude lower than previously reported — are demonstrated in small photonic crystal cavities incorporating InGaAsP. These devices can switch within a few tens of picoseconds, and may therefore have potential for low-power high-density all-optical processing on a chip.

    • Kengo Nozaki
    • Takasumi Tanabe
    • Masaya Notomi
    Article
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Interview

  • Time-domain cavity solitons could be a promising candidate for creating all-optical buffers integrated with pulse reshapers and wavelength converters. Stéphane Coen spoke with Nature Photonics about the generation of these solitons and their potential applications in telecommunications.

    • Rachel Won
    Interview
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Focus

  • Optical sensing, based both on fibre and other technologies is now playing an increasingly important role in diverse applications ranging from surveying to brewing and pipeline monitoring.

    Focus
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