Lasers, LEDs and light sources articles within Nature Photonics

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  • News & Views |

    The demonstration of a solid-state yellow laser based on diamond could bring new levels of convenience and capability for biomedical applications.

    • Andrew D. Greentree
    •  & Steven Prawer

  • Letter |

    Scientists report a mode-locking regime of an erbium-doped fibre laser in which the laser pulse evolves as a similariton in the gain segment of the cavity and transforms into a soliton in the rest of the cavity. The findings constitute the first observation of amplifier similaritons in a laser cavity and are likely to be applicable to various other nonlinear systems.

    • Bulent Oktem
    • , Coşkun Ülgüdür
    •  & F. Ömer Ilday

  • Article |

    Precise spatial characterization of the origin of light emission from organic light-emitting diodes is important for improving the design of future devices and gaining valuable insight into their operation. Here, a characterization scheme that achieves this task with a spatial resolution better than 5 nm is reported.

    • S. L. M. van Mensfoort
    • , M. Carvelli
    •  & R. Coehoorn

  • Editorial |

    An iPhone application for browsing nature.com content may change the way we access research news.

  • Interview |

    Andreas Stingl, CEO of Austrian company Femtolasers, talks to Nadya Anscombe about the market for femtosecond lasers and their wide variety of applications.

    • Nadya Anscombe

  • Industry Perspective |

    Table-top sources that generate both extreme ultraviolet light and soft X-rays through high-harmonic generation of ultrafast infrared laser pulses look set to perform tasks previously accessible using only large-scale synchrotrons.

    • Iain McKinnie
    •  & Henry Kapteyn

  • News & Views |

    On-demand single-photon sources with high efficiency are required to realize many of the applications of quantum optics. By exploiting photonic mode transformation in a tapered nanowire, researchers have created a source that has an unprecedented extraction efficiency over an extremely broad spectral range.

    • Stefan Strauf

  • News & Views |

    The use of a specially designed cavity to enhance the intensity of femtosecond ultraviolet pulses dramatically increases the rate at which non-classical states of light can be produced.

    • R. Jason Jones

  • Article |

    The combination of distributed Rayleigh back-scatter and Raman gain in an optical fibre yields an open cavity, mirror-less fibre laser that offers stable operation at the telecommunications wavelength of 1.5 µm.

    • Sergei K. Turitsyn
    • , Sergey A. Babin
    •  & Evgenii V. Podivilov

  • Product Focus |

    Optical parametric oscillators simultaneously generate two beams of coherent light that are widely tunable in wavelength. This flexibility makes them a popular tool in various areas of scientific research, reports Neil Savage.

    • Neil Savage

  • Out of the lab |

    Could lasers directly driven by sunlight help address the planet's energy generation problems? Japanese scientists are optimistic, reports Duncan Graham-Rowe.

    • Duncan Graham-Rowe

  • Interview |

    Generating 3D light packets that propagate without dispersing in time or space is not an easy task. Andy Chong from Cornell University told Nature Photonics how he and his co-workers came up with a simple and versatile approach to this problem.

    • Rachel Won

  • News & Views |

    Researchers from Princeton and Northwestern Universities have independently demonstrated, through different design strategies, mid-infrared quantum cascade lasers with wall-plug efficiencies reaching 50%. The result is a quantum cascade laser so efficient that it generates more light than heat, albeit at low temperatures of operation.

    • Hui Chun Liu

  • News & Views |

    The demonstration of an LED made from a single electrostatically doped carbon nanotube p–n junction with dramatically improved light-emission efficiency marks an important advance for carbon nanotube photonics.

    • Tobias Hertel

  • News & Views |

    Researchers are proposing a new experiment that will probe fundamental aspects of the quantum vacuum by searching for highly elusive photon–photon scattering events.

    • Mattias Marklund

  • Letter |

    The first enhancement cavity for femtosecond ultraviolet pulses is demonstrated. More than 7 W of average ultraviolet power at an 81 MHz repetition rate, available to pump a nonlinear crystal inside the cavity, is exploited in an implementation of a powerful source for high-rate experiments with entangled multiphoton states.

    • Roland Krischek
    • , Witlef Wieczorek
    •  & Harald Weinfurter

  • Letter |

    Researchers have constructed a terahertz quantum cascade laser using quasi-periodic distributed feedback gratings based on the Fibonacci sequence. Features that go beyond traditional distributed feedback lasers are demonstrated, such as directional output independent of the emission frequency and multicolour operation.

    • Lukas Mahler
    • , Alessandro Tredicucci
    •  & Diederik S. Wiersma

  • Letter |

    The generation of spatiotemporal optical wave packets that are resistant to both dispersion and diffraction are attractive for bioimaging applications and plasma physics. By combining Bessel beams in the transverse plane with temporal Airy pulses, scientists now report the first observation of a class of versatile three-dimensional linear light ‘bullets’.

    • Andy Chong
    • , William H. Renninger
    •  & Frank W. Wise

  • Letter |

    By exploiting the Stark manifold resonance in a crystalline host, scientists report laser cooling of ytterbium-doped LiYF4 crystals from room temperature to ∼155 K, with a cooling power of 90 mW. This is the lowest temperature achieved without using cryogens or mechanical refrigeration, surpassing the performance of multistage Peltier coolers.

    • Denis V. Seletskiy
    • , Seth D. Melgaard
    •  & Mansoor Sheik-Bahae

  • Letter |

    A quantum cascade laser with a wall-plug efficiency of up to 50% is experimentally realized when operated at low temperatures and in pulsed mode. The high-efficiency performance is achieved by implementing an ultrastrong coupling between the injector and active regions.

    • Peter Q. Liu
    • , Anthony J. Hoffman
    •  & Claire F. Gmachl

  • Letter |

    A mid-infrared quantum cascade laser that emits more light than heat and features a high wall-plug efficiency of up to 53% when operated a temperature of 40 K is reported. The device utilizes a single-well injector design.

    • Yanbo Bai
    • , Steven Slivken
    •  & Manijeh Razeghi

  • Industry Perspective |

    Advances in nano-imprint lithography have moved the technology out of the laboratory and onto the production floor for use in a wide variety of photonic applications.

    • Gerald Kreindl
    • , Thomas Glinsner
    •  & Ron Miller

  • Interview |

    Few-cycle light pulses are important for attosecond science and extremely nonlinear optics. Alfred Leitenstorfer from the University of Konstanz spoke to Nature Photonics about how erbium-doped fibre laser technology can generate single-cycle pulses at telecommunications wavelengths.

    • Rachel Won

  • News & Views |

    By combining the output from two synchronized light sources, single-cycle laser pulses at the telecommunications wavelength of 1.5 μm have been successfully generated. The achievement is set to benefit ultrafast optical spectroscopy and attosecond science.

    • Uwe Morgner

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