Nanophotonics and plasmonics articles within Nature Photonics

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  • Article |

    Super-stealth laser cutting with nanometre precision and aspect ratios of the order of 1,000 is demonstrated. The technique is applicable to a broad variety of transparent solids, including silica, lithium tantalate, lithium niobate, YAG, Ce:YAG, Ti:sapphire and β-Ga2O3.

    • Zhen-Ze Li
    • , Hua Fan
    •  & Hong-Bo Sun

  • News & Views |

    Holographic waveguides using shallow etching of silicon-on-insulator waveguides makes designing integrated, preset optical vector matrix multiplication computationally tractable and commercially available.

    • Daniel Brunner

  • Review Article |

    This Review discusses the physics of nonreciprocal radiation and Kirchhoff’s law generalization in the context of nanophotonics-enabled nonreciprocal thermal applications.

    • Shuihua Yang
    • , Mengqi Liu
    •  & Cheng-Wei Qiu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The strong dispersion of surface phonon polaritons in silicon carbide films is exploited to tailor the orbital angular momentum of phonon polaritons, achieving reconfigurable polaritonic optical vortices that are attractive for orbital-angular-momentum-enabled light–matter interactions at mid-infrared frequencies.

    • Andrea Mancini
    • , Lin Nan
    •  & Stefan A. Maier

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Time-resolved lightwave-driven scanning tunnelling spectroscopy is developed to investigate how the spin–orbit-split energy levels of a selenium vacancy within a WSe2 monolayer shift under phonon displacement. Ultrafast snapshots of the electronic tunnelling spectra reveal transient energy shifts up to 40 meV.

    • C. Roelcke
    • , L. Z. Kastner
    •  & Y. A. Gerasimenko

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Free-electron homodyne detection allows measuring phase-resolved optical responses in electron microscopy, demonstrated in the imaging of plasmonic fields with few-nanometre spatial and sub-cycle temporal resolutions.

    • John H. Gaida
    • , Hugo Lourenço-Martins
    •  & Claus Ropers

  • Article |

    Conformal transformation optics is exploited to design curved accelerating waveguides with spatially gradient curvatures to boost the nonlinear efficiency and broaden the bandwidth of the nonlinear optical processes in the waveguides.

    • Chunyu Huang
    • , Yu Luo
    •  & Hui Liu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    An integrated high-energy laser that combines a passively Q-switched laser cavity based on a silicon-nitride photonic integrated circuit with an optically pumped gain layer consisting of thulium-doped alumina is reported, representing a pivotal advancement in integrated pulsed lasers.

    • Neetesh Singh
    • , Jan Lorenzen
    •  & Franz X. Kärtner

  • News & Views |

    Nonlinear optical resonators allow the coherent conversion of photons, yet fabrication tolerances limit their wavelength accuracy. Introducing periodic modulation in ring resonators is shown to allow robust and predictable selection of the converted photons.

    • Alfredo De Rossi
    •  & Sylvain Combrié

  • Review Article |

    Advances in the understanding of optical skyrmions, within a unified topological framework, are reviewed. The field structure of such optical quasiparticles, and their topological characteristics, may be useful for fields ranging from imaging to quantum technologies.

    • Yijie Shen
    • , Qiang Zhang
    •  & Anatoly V. Zayats

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Radio-frequency modulation of optical signals increase the parallelization of photonic processors beyond that afforded by exploiting spatial and wavelength dimensions alone. The approach is then demonstrated on electrocardiogram signals and identifies patients at sudden death risk with 93.5% accuracy.

    • Bowei Dong
    • , Samarth Aggarwal
    •  & H. Bhaskaran

  • 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
    | Open Access

    Detecting the vibrations of individual molecules directly in the mid-infrared regime is hindered by thermal noise. Here researchers bypass conventional detectors and upconvert the mid-infrared photons into visible light using molecular bonds, yielding an optical readout for single-molecule vibrational spectroscopy.

    • Rohit Chikkaraddy
    • , Rakesh Arul
    •  & Jeremy J. Baumberg

  • Article |

    By engineering the plasmonic response of a nanopatterned silver gate electrode, the radiative decay rate of excitons in a tungsten disulfide monolayer can be enhanced via the Purcell effect, creating high modulation efficiencies at room temperature.

    • Qitong Li
    • , Jung-Hwan Song
    •  & Mark L. Brongersma

  • News & Views |

    Dynamic control of incoherent light sources at ultrafast timescales is tremendously challenging. Now, a technique using a spatially structured optical pump and semiconductor metasurfaces has been developed that dynamically steers sub-picosecond pulses of ultrafast incoherent emission.

    • Angela Demetriadou

  • Article |

    A special-purpose quantum simulator, based on a coherently controlled broadband quantum frequency comb produced in a chip-scale dynamically modulated monolithic lithium niobate microresonator, is demonstrated, opening paths for chip-scale implementation of large-scale analogue quantum simulation and computation in the time–frequency domain.

    • Usman A. Javid
    • , Raymond Lopez-Rios
    •  & Qiang Lin

  • Article |

    An integrated electro-optic isolator on thin-film lithium niobate enables non-reciprocal isolation by microwave-driven travelling-wave phase modulation. The isolator exhibits a maximum optical isolation of 48.0 dB at around 1,553 nm and an on-chip insertion loss of 0.5 dB.

    • Mengjie Yu
    • , Rebecca Cheng
    •  & Marko Lončar

  • 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

  • Article |

    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.

    • Sunchao Huang
    • , Ruihuan Duan
    •  & Liang Jie Wong

  • Article |

    A chip-scale laser platform based on silicon nitride ring resonators and commercial Fabry–Pérot laser diodes is developed for the wavelength range from 404 nm to 785 nm. The achieved coarse and fine tunings are up to 12.5 nm and 33.9 GHz, respectively, with kilohertz-scale linewidths and side-mode suppression ratios above 35 dB.

    • Mateus Corato-Zanarella
    • , Andres Gil-Molina
    •  & Michal Lipson

  • Editorial |

    Early research towards bulk metamaterials and exotic properties has been supplanted by work on thin metasurfaces ripe for commercialization, as outlined in this Focus issue.

  • Q&A |

    George Palikaras, President and CEO of Meta Materials Inc., discusses the challenges of commercializing metamaterials, learned on the path from a small start-up to a Nasdaq-listed company.

    • David Pile

  • Q&A |

    Geoffroy Lerosey, co-founder and CEO/CSO of Greenerwave, shares how tunable metasurfaces may shake up industries from automotive to wireless communications.

    • David Pile

  • Review Article |

    Nonlocal effects—in which the optical response of a system at a given spatial point depends on the field in the surrounding space—are reviewed in the context of metasurfaces and flat optics. Nonlocal flat optics may be useful for controlling light in ultra-thin platforms.

    • Kunal Shastri
    •  & Francesco Monticone

  • 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 |

    Panuski et al. demonstrate a programmable photonic crystal cavity array, enabling the spatiotemporal control of a 64 resonator, two-dimensional spatial light modulator with nanosecond- and femtojoule-order switching.

    • Christopher L. Panuski
    • , Ian Christen
    •  & Dirk R. Englund

  • News & Views |

    The hardest barrier in the way to topological control over light with magnetic fields is extremely weak magneto-optic coupling. Now, strong light-matter coupling in an optical cavity has been used to reach record energy splitting values for photonic spins in magnetic fields. This is a potential game changer for topological photonics.

    • Anton Nalitov

  • News & Views |

    Breaking reciprocity at the nanoscale can produce directional formation of images due to the asymmetric nonlinear optical response of subwavelength anisotropic resonators. The self-induced passive non-reciprocity has advantages compared to magnet or time modulation approaches and may impact both classical and quantum photonics.

    • Christos Argyropoulos

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