Nonlinear optics articles within Nature Physics

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  • News & Views |

    When photons impinge on a material, free electrons can be created by the photoelectric effect. The emitted electron current usually fluctuates with Poisson statistics, but if squeezed quantum light is applied, the electrons bunch up.

    • Alfred Leitenstorfer
    •  & Peter Baum

  • Article |

    Photoemission experiments demonstrate that the photon number statistics of the exciting light can be imprinted on the emitted electrons, allowing the controlled generation of classical or non-classical electron number statistics of free electrons.

    • Jonas Heimerl
    • , Alexander Mikhaylov
    •  & Peter Hommelhoff

  • Article |

    Mode locking, which is a common technique to produce short laser pulses, is demonstrated in a topological laser.

    • Christian R. Leefmans
    • , Midya Parto
    •  & Alireza Marandi

  • News & Views |

    A nonlinear optical approach has now enabled picosecond control of a complex band structure, driving a non-Hermitian topological phase transition across an exceptional-point singularity.

    • Jiangbin Gong
    •  & Ching Hua Lee

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Material characterization of liquids in extreme thermodynamic conditions is a challenging technical problem. Brillouin scattering metrology in an optical fibre design with a sealed liquid core now enables spatially resolved temperature and pressure measurements, using carbon disulfide as an example.

    • Andreas Geilen
    • , Alexandra Popp
    •  & Birgit Stiller

  • Article |

    Coherent control is an interference technique widely used to control dynamic wave processes. Its analogue in the time domain allows the tailored suppression, enhancement and reshaping of optical pulses, and the mimicking of collisions between them.

    • Emanuele Galiffi
    • , Gengyu Xu
    •  & Andrea Alù

  • News & Views |

    Measuring the transmission matrix of disordered structures has so far been limited to the domain of linear systems. Now it has been measured for nonlinear disorder, with exciting implications for information capacity.

    • Sushil Mujumdar

  • News & Views |

    Multi-colour light fields allow a nonlinear coupling between free electrons and propagating light by stimulated Compton scattering, without the need for near fields to mediate the interaction.

    • Niklas Müller
    •  & Sascha Schäfer

  • Article |

    Although massive electrons and massless photons are known to interact, their study has so far been confined to the linear regime. Experiments showing two-photon coherent control of a free-electron matter wave now introduce non-linearities.

    • Maxim Tsarev
    • , Johannes W. Thurner
    •  & Peter Baum

  • Article |

    A temporal version of Young’s double-slit experiment shows characteristic interference in the frequency domain when light interacts with time slits produced by ultrafast changes in the refractive index of an epsilon-near-zero material.

    • Romain Tirole
    • , Stefano Vezzoli
    •  & Riccardo Sapienza

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Measurements on a single artificial atom—a quantum dot—coupled to an optical cavity show scattering dynamics that depend on the number of photons involved in the light–matter interaction, which is a signature of stimulated emission.

    • Natasha Tomm
    • , Sahand Mahmoodian
    •  & Richard J. Warburton

  • Article |

    Interactions between photons arise due to the presence of optical nonlinearities. In topological Thouless pumps, a sufficiently strong nonlinearity leads to soliton transport with a fractionally quantized plateau structure—reminiscent of transport in the fractional quantum Hall effect.

    • Marius Jürgensen
    • , Sebabrata Mukherjee
    •  & Mikael C. Rechtsman

  • Review Article |

    Nonlinearities allow the large number of modes in a multimode fibre to interact and create emergent phenomena. This Review presents the breadth of the high-dimensional nonlinear physics that can be studied in this platform.

    • Logan G. Wright
    • , Fan O. Wu
    •  & Frank W. Wise

  • News & Views |

    All-optical devices hold promise as a platform for ultralow-power, sub-nanosecond photonic classical and quantum information processing. Measurements of the dynamics of a single photon switch unveil the quantum correlations at the root of its operation.

    • Victoria A. Norman
    •  & Marina Radulaski

  • Letter |

    Efficient interactions between two photons is a challenging requirement for quantum information processing. A quantum dot coupled to a waveguide produces strong interactions that can induce photon correlations and reshape two-photon wavepackets.

    • Hanna Le Jeannic
    • , Alexey Tiranov
    •  & Peter Lodahl

  • News & Views |

    Upon combining dissipative and nonlinear effects in a bipartite lattice of cavity polaritons, dissipatively stabilized bulk gap solitons emerge, which create a topological interface.

    • Flore K. Kunst

  • Article |

    Drive engineering in optical systems can be used to stabilize new nonlinear phases in topological systems. Dissipatively stabilized gap solitons in a polariton lattice establish drive engineering as a resource for nonlinear topological photonics.

    • Nicolas Pernet
    • , Philippe St-Jean
    •  & Jacqueline Bloch

  • News & Views |

    Nonlinear optical effects enable sophisticated functionalities to generate and manipulate light. The precise control of two distinct nonlinear phenomena in a photonic chip can enhance a key optical nonlinearity that makes single-photon sources more efficient.

    • Thiago P. Mayer Alegre
    •  & Gustavo S. Wiederhecker

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Nonlinear phononics is a method for creating transient structural changes in solids, but its effect is limited to the region of optical excitation. Now, coupling to a propagating polariton allows nonlinear phononics to drive a nonlocal response.

    • M. Henstridge
    • , M. Först
    •  & A. Cavalleri

  • Article |

    The modern understanding of quantum transport relies on geometric concepts such as the Berry phase. The geometric approach has now been extended to the theory of optical transitions.

    • Junyeong Ahn
    • , Guang-Yu Guo
    •  & Ashvin Vishwanath

  • News & Views |

    Nonlinear optical effects are by default weak but they can be enhanced by sculpting the resulting spectrally periodic pulses from a fibre laser into an optimal shape.

    • Thibaut Sylvestre

  • Article |

    The nonlinear optical effects underlying many applications are typically weak, but linear dispersion engineering allows the generation of pulses comprising equidistant frequency components, which enhances the effective nonlinearity.

    • Joshua P. Lourdesamy
    • , Antoine F. J. Runge
    •  & C. Martijn de Sterke

  • Article |

    Optical frequency combs are a key technology in precision time keeping, spectroscopy and metrology. A theoretical proposal shows that introducing topological principles into their design makes on-chip combs more efficient and robust against fabrication defects.

    • Sunil Mittal
    • , Gregory Moille
    •  & Mohammad Hafezi

  • News & Views |

    Nonlinearity and topology are both linked to symmetries, but what happens when the two are combined is not a trivial question. In a nonlinear photonic higher-order topological insulator, solitons localize on the corners together with the topological modes.

    • Grazia Salerno

  • Letter
    | Open Access

    The nonlinear properties of photonic topological insulators remain largely unexplored, as band topology is linked to linear systems. But nonlinear topological corner states and solitons can form in a second-order topological insulator, as shown by experiments.

    • Marco S. Kirsch
    • , Yiqi Zhang
    •  & Matthias Heinrich

  • Letter |

    Quantum jitter fundamentally limits the performance of microresonator frequency combs. The timing jitter of the solitons that generate the comb spectra is analysed, reaching the quantum limit and establishing fundamental limits for soliton microcombs.

    • Chengying Bao
    • , Myoung-Gyun Suh
    •  & Kerry J. Vahala

  • Article |

    Energy–momentum phase-matching enables strong interactions between free electrons and light waves. As a result, the wavefunction of the electron exhibits a comb structure, which was observed using photon-induced near-field electron microscopy.

    • Raphael Dahan
    • , Saar Nehemia
    •  & Ido Kaminer

  • Article |

    Mode-locking of lasers can be understood as self-organization, and the three-dimensional case of spatiotemporal mode-locking can described using attractor dissection theory, which helps develop an intuition for this complex case.

    • Logan G. Wright
    • , Pavel Sidorenko
    •  & Frank W. Wise

  • Article |

    Single-cycle interferometric autocorrelation measurements of electrons tunnelling across the gap of a plasmonic bowtie antenna and quantitative models provide insight into the physical interactions that drive the electron transfer.

    • Markus Ludwig
    • , Garikoitz Aguirregabiria
    •  & Daniele Brida

  • Letter |

    In inertial confinement fusion experiments, the effect of the overlapping laser beams on the plasma is predicted to lead to a distortion of the electron distribution function, which has now been observed in experiments.

    • David Turnbull
    • , Arnaud Colaïtis
    •  & Dustin H. Froula

  • Article |

    A dissipative Kerr soliton crystal state is a temporally ordered regular ensemble of soliton pulses within a cavity. Chaotic driving of optical resonators enables the defect-free creation and dynamical characterization of these states.

    • Maxim Karpov
    • , Martin H. P. Pfeiffer
    •  & Tobias J. Kippenberg

  • Letter |

    High harmonics are generated from a thin film by leveraging the epsilon-near-zero effect. These kinds of harmonic are found to exhibit a pronounced spectral redshift as well as linewidth broadening caused by the time-dependency of this effect.

    • Yuanmu Yang
    • , Jian Lu
    •  & Igal Brener

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