Nonlinear optics articles within Nature Photonics

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  • Article |

    Nonlinear microring resonators can generate a vortex soliton microcomb, that is, a frequency comb with each comb line carrying a distinct orbital angular momentum.

    • Yanwu Liu
    • , Chenghao Lao
    •  & Qi-Fan Yang

  • Article |

    Kerr resonators can support a new form of parametrically driven temporal cavity soliton (and associated optical frequency comb), with potential performance advantages that include background-free operation and the possibility of very high pump-to-comb conversion efficiencies.

    • Grégory Moille
    • , Miriam Leonhardt
    •  & Miro Erkintalo

  • 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

  • News & Views |

    One-way light transmission can be realized by embracing, rather than mitigating, thermal effects in carefully engineered metasurfaces.

    • Said Rahimzadeh-Kalaleh Rodriguez
    •  & Sander A. Mann

  • Obituary |

    Vladimir Zakharov was a man of a strong passion and grand intellect, who was equally and deservedly proud of both his scientific achievements and his poetry.

    • G. E. Falkovich
    • , E. A. Kuznetsov
    •  & S. K. Turitsyn

  • News & Views |

    A scheme for fast, comprehensive characterization of high-dimensional quantum states could aid quantum applications in imaging and information processing.

    • Gregory Kanter
    •  & Prem Kumar

  • Perspective |

    Since the inception of the idea of temporal solitons in optical fibres, published in 1973, the concept of optical solitons has revolutionized the fundamental science of optics and photonics technologies. This Perspective gives an outlook on the future of solitons in ultrafast lasers, frequency combs, biomedical applications, telecommunications and signal processing, as well as the emerging new science of solitons.

    • Andrea Blanco-Redondo
    • , C. Martijn de Sterke
    •  & Sergei K. Turitsyn

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Researchers demonstrated coherent dissipative Kerr solitons with a conversion efficiency exceeding 50% and good line spacing stability. The results may facilitate practical implementation of a scalable integrated photonic architecture for energy-efficient applications.

    • Óskar B. Helgason
    • , Marcello Girardi
    •  & Victor Torres-Company

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The incoherent component of the fluorescence from a single two-level atom is investigated after rejecting the coherent component. Contrary to intuition, its photon statistics experimentally shows strong photon bunching. This result suggests that the atom does in fact simultaneously scatter two photons.

    • Luke Masters
    • , Xin-Xin Hu
    •  & Jürgen Volz

  • 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 |

    This work reports an inverse design approach that can spectrally shape Kerr microcombs by imprinting a nanophotonic dispersion filter to a microresonator to engineer solitonic frequency-comb states in the resonator with an optimization algorithm.

    • Erwan Lucas
    • , Su-Peng Yu
    •  & Scott B. Papp

  • 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

  • Comment |

    In recent decades, progress in developing better nonlinear materials has not been as rapid as wished. Here I propose that this may be explained by considering the simple view of nonlinear optical phenomena as being determined mostly by the length of interaction time between photons and matter. Tentative routes towards improvements in the efficiency of nonlinear optical phenomena are suggested.

    • Jacob B. Khurgin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Current LiDAR approaches suffer from congestion issues, which affect measurement performance and increased system complexity. Now researchers demonstrate a chaotic microcomb that exhibits congestion-immune naturally orthogonalized light channels.

    • Ruixuan Chen
    • , Haowen Shu
    •  & Xingjun Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A terawatt laser filament is shown to be able to guide lightning over a distance of 50 m in field trials on the Säntis mountain in the Swiss Alps.

    • Aurélien Houard
    • , Pierre Walch
    •  & Jean-Pierre Wolf

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A nonlinear multi-pass cell is shown to be able to shift the central wavelength of a laser by tens of nanometres, offering a new means for control for high-power laser systems

    • Prannay Balla
    • , Henrik Tünnermann
    •  & Christoph M. Heyl

  • Article |

    The intrinsic Kerr nonlinearity in ring resonators is exploited to demonstrate passive isolation of a continuous-wave laser. Up to 35-dB isolation with 5-dB insertion loss was achieved on-chip.

    • Alexander D. White
    • , Geun Ho Ahn
    •  & Jelena Vučković

  • News & Views |

    The use of on-chip nonlinear waveguides that can convert 1.5-μm wavelength signals into the 2-μm region brings new opportunities for expanding the bandwidth of optical communications.

    • Fatima Gunning
    •  & Brian Corbett

  • News & Views |

    Multilayered ferroelectric NbOI2 crystals with sub-100-nm thickness exhibit efficient second harmonic generation, paving the way for on-chip nonlinear optical components.

    • Rupert F. Oulton
    • , Jefferson Flórez
    •  & Alex S. Clark

  • Letter
    | Open Access

    An ultrabroadband femtosecond enhancement cavity is developed, using gold-coated mirrors and a wedged-diamond-plate input coupler. Simultaneous enhancement of a 22–40 THz offset-free frequency comb allows cavity-enhanced time-domain spectroscopy of gas mixtures based on electro-optic sampling in the mid-infrared range.

    • Philipp Sulzer
    • , Maximilian Högner
    •  & Ioachim Pupeza

  • 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

  • News & Views |

    A micropillar cavity that can impart a phase shift to single photons offers a promising route to scalable quantum information processing with light.

    • Stephan Dürr

  • Letter |

    Researchers exploit the quadratic nonlinearity of lithium niobate nanowaveguides and demonstrate cavity-free all-optical switching. Switching energies down to 80 fJ, switching times down to ~46 fs and energy–time products of 3.7 × 10−27 J s are shown.

    • Qiushi Guo
    • , Ryoto Sekine
    •  & Alireza Marandi

  • News & Views |

    Co-doping ytterbium and praseodymium ions in photon avalanche nanoparticles rapidly builds up huge optical nonlinearities, enabling confocal microscopy to achieve super-resolution imaging at high speed.

    • Chaohao Chen
    •  & Dayong Jin

  • Article |

    An analogous all-optical Stern–Gerlach experiment is observed in nonlinear optics, where the frequency of light acts as a pseudospin. The deflection depends on the strength of the nonlinear coupling gradient as well as on the relative phase between the different input frequencies.

    • Ofir Yesharim
    • , Aviv Karnieli
    •  & Ady Arie

  • News & Views |

    Coherent multi-octave mid-infrared waveforms are created and manipulated by cascaded intrapulse difference-frequency generation, demonstrating absolute phase control, and adding to the growing arsenal of techniques for arbitrary light-wave control.

    • Jeffrey Moses
    •  & Shu-Wei Huang

  • News & Views |

    One hundred years ago, in 1922, Léon Brillouin discovered the scattering of light by sound waves. Within an optical fibre, Brillouin scattering may be used to create narrow-linewidth filters and spectrometers. A twisted optical fibre is now used to reduce these linewidths by over an order of magnitude, down to the sub-MHz level.

    • Thiago Alegre
    •  & Gustavo Wiederhecker

  • Article |

    Strained NbOI2 flakes with a thickness of 20 nm exhibit a record SHG absolute conversion efficiency of >0.2% and an effective bulk-like nonlinear susceptibility of 1.1 × 10−9 m V−1 at the fundamental wavelength of 1,050 nm. The spatial profile of the polarized second-harmonic generation response can be tuned by the fundamental wavelength.

    • Ibrahim Abdelwahab
    • , Benjamin Tilmann
    •  & Kian Ping Loh

  • Letter |

    Asymmetric parametric generation of light in nonlinear metasurfaces is enabled by nonlinear dielectric resonators in translucent metasurfaces. Upon infrared illumination, different and independent visible light images are detected for ‘forwards’ versus ‘backwards’ operation.

    • Sergey S. Kruk
    • , Lei Wang
    •  & Yuri Kivshar

  • Letter |

    Giant effective photon–photon interactions are achieved by hybridizing light with excitons in an InGaAs-based quantum well micropillar cavity. Cross-phase modulation of up to 3 mrad per polariton is observed at the laser intensity below the single-photon level.

    • Tintu Kuriakose
    • , Paul M. Walker
    •  & Dmitry N. Krizhanovskii

  • Article |

    Tunable sub-megahertz spectral features are demonstrated without resonators. The approach, which exploits gain-enhanced polarization pulling in a twisted birefringent medium, may be useful in applications such as microwave photonic filters, slow and fast light, and optical sensing.

    • Neel Choksi
    • , Yi Liu
    •  & Li Qian

  • Letter
    | Open Access

    Modifications of the effective band structure of MgO crystal is investigated on a timescale within one-quarter cycle of the electromagnetic-field oscillation. The high-harmonic generation spectra show a signature of laser-induced closing of the bandgap.

    • Ayelet J. Uzan-Narovlansky
    • , Álvaro Jiménez-Galán
    •  & Nirit Dudovich

  • Article |

    Researchers demonstrate systems in which optical solitons coexist and interact with topological solitonic structures localized in the molecular alignment field of a soft birefringent medium. The findings could lead to solitonic tractor beams and new light–matter self-patterning phenomena.

    • Guilhem Poy
    • , Andrew J. Hess
    •  & Ivan I. Smalyukh

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