Imaging and sensing articles within Nature Photonics

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  • News & Views |

    Ultrasound-induced luminescence in trianthracene derivative-based nanoparticles enables tumour imaging and immunological profiling in a variety of in vivo models.

    • Cheng Xu
    •  & Kanyi Pu

  • News & Views |

    A non-common-path interferometric scheme enables holographic detection of single proteins of mass 90 kDa and estimation of single-protein polarizability.

    • Chia-Lung Hsieh

  • News & Views |

    Brillouin light scattering anisotropy microscopy affords single-shot collection of angle-resolved phonon dispersion, enabling the mapping of mechanical anisotropies in living matter with a frequency resolution of 10 MHz and a spatial resolution of 2 µm.

    • Yogeshwari S. Ambekar
    •  & Giuliano Scarcelli

  • News & Views |

    The fast response and efficiency of plastic scintillators are severely degraded by the preferential population of slow triplet excited states in luminescence centres, such as in dye molecules. This issue can be solved by hot exciton manipulation, which avoids population of the lowest triplet state.

    • Martin Nikl

  • Article |

    An optical readout technique for the chemical potential of an arbitrary two-dimensional material is realized using a monolayer transition metal dichalcogenide semiconductor sensor whose optical response sharply depends on the chemical potential.

    • Zhengchao Xia
    • , Yihang Zeng
    •  & Kin Fai Mak

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Using programmable integrated photonics to generate a higher-order free-space structured light beam promises lossless and reconfigurable control of the spatial distribution of light’s amplitude and phase with very short switching times.

    • Johannes Bütow
    • , Jörg S. Eismann
    •  & Peter Banzer

  • Article |

    Researchers overcome the typical scintillator trade-off between high efficiency and speed. In organic scintillators, researchers drove hot excitons into fast singlet emission states without involving the lowest triplet states, which led to a fast radiative lifetime and strong light yield that may be applicable to ultrafast detection and imaging.

    • Xinyuan Du
    • , Shan Zhao
    •  & Jiang Tang

  • News & Views |

    A coherent microwave-to-optical conversion scheme, previously feasible only under cryogenic environments, has now been expanded to ambient conditions by using Rydberg atoms.

    • Kai-Yu Liao
    • , Hui Yan
    •  & Shi-Liang Zhu

  • Review Article |

    This Review covers a comparison between various label-free biomedical imaging techniques, their advantages over label-based methods and relevant applications.

    • Natan T. Shaked
    • , Stephen A. Boppart
    •  & Jürgen Popp

  • News & Views |

    Combining photoacoustic excitation with optomechanics enables the mechanical modes associated with entire microorganisms to be detected, demonstrating that mechanical spectroscopy allows us to identify microorganisms and characterize their life stages.

    • Eduardo Gil-Santos

  • News & Views |

    Event-based detectors, which respond to local changes in light intensity rather than producing images, enable super-resolution single-molecule localization microscopy with sensitivity and resolution comparable to conventional methods.

    • Ian M. Dobbie

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Continuous-wave conversion of a 13.9 GHz field to a near-infrared optical signal is demonstrated by using Rydberg atoms at room temperature. The conversion bandwidth is 16 MHz and the conversion dynamic range is 57 dB, descending down to 3.8 K noise-equivalent temperature.

    • Sebastian Borówka
    • , Uliana Pylypenko
    •  & Michał Parniak

  • News & Views |

    Vibrations of individual molecules are difficult to detect due to thermal noise. In a recent report, researchers overcome this challenge, upconverting mid-infrared photons into visible light using nanophotonic cavities. The result is high-efficiency optical readout for single-molecule vibrational spectroscopy.

    • Matthew Sheldon

  • Article |

    Natural vibrations of mesoscopic particles, such as living cells, are typically faint; occurring at megahertz to gigahertz frequencies also makes detection challenging. Now, researchers demonstrate real-time measurement of natural vibrations of single mesoscopic particles by using photoacoustic excitation and acoustic coupling to an optical microresonator for readout.

    • Shui-Jing Tang
    • , Mingjie Zhang
    •  & Yun-Feng Xiao

  • Article |

    The intrinsic random amplitude and phase modulation of 40 distinct lines of a microresonator frequency comb operated in the modulation instability regime are used to realize massively parallel random-modulation continuous-wave light detection and ranging, without requiring any electro-optical modulator or microwave synthesizer.

    • Anton Lukashchuk
    • , Johann Riemensberger
    •  & Tobias J. Kippenberg

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Photonic radar is exploited for non-contact vital sign detection with a demonstration on a cane toad with a view to application in humans. Optical signals generated from the system are also explored for LiDAR-based vital sign detection, which may yield improved accuracy and system robustness.

    • Ziqian Zhang
    • , Yang Liu
    •  & Benjamin J. Eggleton

  • Article |

    Two-photon excitation with mid- and near-infrared pulses encodes bond selectivity in fluorescence imaging. Single-molecule imaging and spectroscopy is demonstrated on individual fluorophores as well as various labelled biological targets.

    • Haomin Wang
    • , Dongkwan Lee
    •  & Lu Wei

  • News & Views |

    Two papers in Science demonstrate tracking of the stepping motion of the kinesin motor protein with nanometric spatial precision and sub-millisecond temporal resolution by using MINFLUX, a highly photon-efficient single-molecule localization technique.

    • Fernando D. Stefani

  • Article |

    Researchers engineer double-tapered optical-fibre arrays and use perovskite nanocrystal substrates for X-ray imaging with a three orders of magnitude output gain and spatial resolution of 22 lp mm−1. Arrayed gamma-ray imaging is also demonstrated using a nanocrystal scintillator film.

    • Luying Yi
    • , Bo Hou
    •  & Xiaogang Liu

  • Article |

    Joint force measurements with entangled optical probes on two optomechanical sensors are demonstrated. The force sensitivity is improved by 40% in the shot-noise-dominant regime. The sensing bandwidth is improved by 20% in the thermal noise limit.

    • Yi Xia
    • , Aman R. Agrawal
    •  & Zheshen Zhang

  • News & Views |

    A photothermal microscopy technique overcomes the diffraction limit by exploiting the spatiotemporal dynamics of heat dissipation within the imaging volume, offering new opportunities for super-resolution, bond-selective and label-free imaging of biological targets.

    • Zhilun Zhao
    •  & Wei Min

  • Letter
    | Open Access

    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.

    • Motoki Yako
    • , Yoshikazu Yamaoka
    •  & Atsushi Ishikawa

  • Article |

    The combination of optical phase conjugation and light amplification enables wavefront shaping with simultaneously optimized operational speed, number of control degrees of freedom and energy of the focused wavefront. Shaping with a 10 μs latency time over about 106 control modes and energy gain approaching unity is demonstrated.

    • Zhongtao Cheng
    • , Chengmingyue Li
    •  & Lihong V. Wang

  • Obituary |

    Recollected by his colleagues as a creative and humble scholar with an indomitable will, Byoungho Lee was enthusiastic about realizing the holistic potential of holographic displays.

    • YongKeun Park
    • , Jae-Hyeung Park
    •  & Ting-Chung Poon

  • Review Article |

    Recent advances in optical metalenses are reviewed with a focus on their unique features and applications in the space of optical metasystems.

    • Amir Arbabi
    •  & Andrei Faraon

  • Review Article |

    Recent developments in reconfigurable metasurfaces are reviewed with a focus on case studies that are promising for commercialization and associated challenges.

    • Tian Gu
    • , Hyun Jung Kim
    •  & Juejun Hu

  • Article |

    A photodetector responding to only circularly polarized light is developed. It has a ring-shaped form, consisting of plasmonic nanostructures on a graphene sheet. Its zero-bias responsivity and detectivity of ellipticity in the mid-infrared at room temperature are 392 V W−1 and 0.03° Hz−1/2, respectively.

    • Jingxuan Wei
    • , Yang Chen
    •  & Cheng-Wei Qiu

  • Article |

    Nitrogen-vacancy centres in surface-engineered diamond are demonstrated to operate as charge-sensitive fluorescent reporters, enabling an optical scheme for voltage recording in physical and biological systems.

    • D. J. McCloskey
    • , N. Dontschuk
    •  & D. A. Simpson

  • Obituary |

    Gabriel Popescu passed away in June 2022. He will be remembered as a creative leader in biophotonics, with pioneering contributions to quantitative phase imaging and spectroscopy, an engaging collaborator and a dear friend.

    • Natan T. Shaked
    • , YongKeun Park
    •  & Peter T. C. So

  • News & Views |

    The three-dimensional images generated by digital holography are usually limited to a single color. A new technique exploiting frequency combs generates holograms with hundreds of colors at once.

    • Chao Dong
    •  & David Burghoff

  • Letter
    | Open Access

    Dual-comb digital holography based on an interferometer composed of two frequency combs of slightly different repetition frequencies and a lensless camera sensor allows highly frequency-multiplexed holography with high temporal coherence.

    • Edoardo Vicentini
    • , Zhenhai Wang
    •  & Nathalie Picqué

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