Materials for optics articles within Nature Materials

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  • News & Views |

    Researchers develop a simple and low-cost fabrication method for the production of large-scale all-dielectric metasurfaces, which exhibit near-perfect reflectivity in the telecommunications spectral window.

    • Nicolas Bonod

  • News & Views |

    Hybrid perovskite is introduced as a new material for nanowire lasers. One-dimensional nanostructures of these perovskites can be optically pumped to lase with tunable wavelength at relatively low threshold, which marks a step towards their use in integrated photonics.

    • Anthony Fu
    •  & Peidong Yang

  • Editorial |

    Inorganic semiconductors, organic emitters and colloidal quantum dots are pushing the LED revolution in lighting and displays.

  • Commentary |

    Organic semiconducting molecules and colloidal quantum dots both make for excellent luminescent materials. Compared with the more established solid-state light-emitting technologies, organic LEDs and quantum-dot LEDs are in their infancy, yet they offer unique properties.

    • Sebastian Reineke

  • Commentary |

    Key materials discoveries have prompted the rise of inorganic light-emitting diodes in the lighting industry. Remaining challenges are being addressed to further extend the impact of this technology in lighting, displays and other applications.

    • Philipp Pust
    • , Peter J. Schmidt
    •  & Wolfgang Schnick

  • Letter |

    A design rule to synthesize organic molecules with a phosphorescence lifetime longer than 1 second is presented. The molecules form H aggregates that promote the stabilization of triplet excitons and persistent luminescence under ambient conditions.

    • Zhongfu An
    • , Chao Zheng
    •  & Wei Huang

  • News & Views |

    A powerful strategy to leverage and combine the optoelectronic characteristics of different 2D materials is to stack them into vertical van der Waals heterostructures. This approach is now used to realize efficient light-emitting devices.

    • Xiaomu Wang
    •  & Fengnian Xia

  • News & Views |

    By carefully selecting only two elemental 'building block materials' at the nanoscale, it is possible to digitally design composite electromagnetic media with properties vastly different from their individual constituents and suitable for performing complex optical functions.

    • Luca Dal Negro

  • News & Views |

    Hexagonal boron nitride nanostructures are shown to sustain phonon–polariton modes with comparable performances to plasmon–polariton modes in graphene but with lower losses.

    • Zubin Jacob

  • News & Views |

    Effective limiting of the intensity of low-power light transmitted through organic thin films under ambient conditions has been achieved by proper design of donor–acceptor systems.

    • Anjun Qin
    •  & Ben Zhong Tang

  • News & Views |

    Control of thermal emission with microsecond switching times has been achieved by using sub-band transitions in composite quantum-well and photonic-crystal structures.

    • Ognjen Ilic
    •  & Marin Soljačić

  • Article |

    Exciton transport in organic materials is negatively affected by molecular disorder. It is now theoretically shown that metalloporphyrin layers support topological edge states that allow exciton currents even in disordered molecular lattices.

    • Joel Yuen-Zhou
    • , Semion K. Saikin
    •  & Alán Aspuru-Guzik

  • Article |

    Inspired by Boolean binary algebra, an approach to design electromagnetic metamaterials with desired permittivity by using just two elemental building blocks is demonstrated analytically and numerically.

    • Cristian Della Giovampaola
    •  & Nader Engheta

  • Article |

    Aromatic molecules and transition-metal complexes dispersed in hydroxyl steroidal matrices reveal efficient reverse saturable absorption when irradiated with low-power light. These materials extend the range of applications of optical limiters.

    • Shuzo Hirata
    • , Kenro Totani
    •  & Martin Vacha

  • Editorial |

    Staggering increases in the performance of organic–inorganic perovskite solar cells have renewed the interest in these materials. However, further developments and the support from academic and industrial partners will hinge on the reporting of accurate efficiency values.

  • Letter |

    Until now, it has not been possible to switch chirality in plasmonic nanostructures at will and repeatedly. Now, thanks to DNA-regulated conformational changes, reconfigurable 3D plasmonic metamolecules with switchable chirality have been created.

    • Anton Kuzyk
    • , Robert Schreiber
    •  & Na Liu

  • News & Views |

    By embedding organic dyes in a suitably designed optical microcavity it is possible to strongly mix light and matter excitations, forming states known as microcavity polaritons. These hybrid light–matter states are used to demonstrate energy transfer between organic molecules over long distances.

    • Russell J. Holmes

  • News & Views |

    The demonstration of amplified spontaneous emission from thin films of perovskites could pave the way to solution-processed low-cost lasers that can be easily tuned across the entire visible spectrum.

    • Frédéric Laquai

  • Letter |

    Fano resonances have been studied for many resonant optical systems. To fully understand the origin behind this phenomenon it would be necessary to have simultaneous information about the dissipation of stored energy in the near-field and the scattering response in the far-field. This is now shown to be possible in a single semiconductor nanostripe using photocurrent measurements.

    • Pengyu Fan
    • , Zongfu Yu
    •  & Mark L. Brongersma

  • Article |

    Optical amplifiers based on erbium ions typically require high pump power densities to produce gain. Now, an organic optical amplifier material composed of erbium ions and a zinc-based organic chromophore is demonstrated to reach population inversion using low-power visible light.

    • H. Q. Ye
    • , Z. Li
    •  & W. P. Gillin

  • Article |

    The use of persistent luminescence nanoparticles for in vivo optical imaging commonly requires ex vivo activation before systemic administration, hampering longer-term imaging capabilities. Now, it is shown that near-infrared emitting nanoprobes based on chromium-doped zinc gallate can be activated in vivo using low-energy red light and used for tumour-targeted imaging and cell tracking experiments.

    • Thomas Maldiney
    • , Aurélie Bessière
    •  & Cyrille Richard

  • Letter |

    Hybrid halide perovskites have demonstrated promising performance as solar cells. It is now reported that these solution-processed materials are also suited to lasing applications, because of the high optical gain and stable amplified spontaneous emission they show in the visible spectral range.

    • Guichuan Xing
    • , Nripan Mathews
    •  & Tze Chien Sum

  • Article |

    Cavity polaritons have been extensively studied in inorganic materials. An organic polariton condensate is now demonstrated to occur in the strongly interacting regime, at room temperature, in a cavity containing an organic polymer.

    • K. S. Daskalakis
    • , S. A. Maier
    •  & S. Kéna-Cohen

  • Letter |

    Understanding the thermal transport properties of superlattice structures is relevant to a number of possible practical applications. Now, the scattering of phonons in oxide superlattices is shown to undergo a crossover from an incoherent to a coherent regime, which in turn strongly alters their thermal behaviour.

    • Jayakanth Ravichandran
    • , Ajay K. Yadav
    •  & Mark A. Zurbuchen

  • Letter |

    Lanthanide-doped nanocrystals can be used to upconvert infrared radiation into visible light, and are thought to be promising for a range of photonic and biological imaging applications. It is now shown that the upconversion efficiency can be improved by appropriately clustering the lanthanide ions on different structural sublattices.

    • Juan Wang
    • , Renren Deng
    •  & Xiaogang Liu

  • Letter |

    The generation and manipulation of single photons is important for quantum information and metrology. Highly bright and stable single-photon sources are now identified in silicon carbide, a wide-bandgap semiconductor widely used for photonic and electronic devices.

    • S. Castelletto
    • , B. C. Johnson
    •  & T. Ohshima

  • Article |

    The propagation of light in photonic crystals with a honeycomb structure mirrors the behaviour of charges in graphene, therefore allowing for the investigation of electronic properties that cannot otherwise be accessed in graphene itself. This approach is now used to predict unexpected edge states that localize in the bearded edges of hexagonal lattices.

    • Yonatan Plotnik
    • , Mikael C. Rechtsman
    •  & Mordechai Segev

  • Interview |

    The recent economic crisis has drastically affected research and development in Greece, but competitive research goes on, says Eleftherios Economou, a founder of the Foundation of Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH) research centre in Greece, and former General Secretary for research and technology.

  • Letter |

    Flexible devices mimicking the sensitivity of human skin typically turn pressure stimuli into electronic signals, which must be further processed to be interpreted by the user. By integrating an active matrix of organic light-emitting diodes in these foldable sensors, pressure can now control the brightness of each coloured pixel, enabling the direct visualization and quantification of the applied stimulus.

    • Chuan Wang
    • , David Hwang
    •  & Ali Javey

  • Letter |

    Making colloidal nanoparticles with controlled composition and shape is challenging because at the nanoscale surface energy favours highly symmetric structures. Now, a fast, wafer-scale fabrication scheme that combines low-temperature shadow deposition with nanoscale patterning has been developed that produces anisotropic hybrid nanocolloids with designed composition and feature sizes down to 20 nm.

    • Andrew G. Mark
    • , John G. Gibbs
    •  & Peer Fischer

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