Optical techniques articles within Nature Photonics

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  • Article |

    Adapting the amplitude-modulated light detection and ranging approach to super-resolution microscopy offers a typical axial localization precision of 6.8 nm over the entire field of view and the axial capture range, enabling imaging of biological samples by up to several micrometres in depth.

    • Pierre Jouchet
    • , Clément Cabriel
    •  & Sandrine Lévêque-Fort

  • News & Views |

    Electromagnetic fields in light waves are mainly transverse to propagation direction but actually also have longitudinal components, which may give rise to unexpected optical phenomena involving the angular momentum of light, such as transverse spin and optical torques.

    • Filippo Cardano
    •  & Lorenzo Marrucci

  • Letter |

    Sculpting and focusing femtosecond cylindrical vector vortex pulses by a slit allows the controllable transformation of the photon’s orbital angular momentum into spin angular momentum, which can be characterized in situ by a strong-field ionization experiment.

    • Yiqi Fang
    • , Meng Han
    •  & Yunquan Liu

  • News & Views |

    Photoluminescence spectroscopy using atomic-scale light reveals an optical transition of a single molecule at sub-nanometre resolution.

    • Takashi Kumagai

  • News & Views |

    The limited control of electrons by light has resulted in photonic-driven circuits lagging far behind their electronic counterparts. Now, a technique exploiting coherent control with structured light has been used to sculpt the spatial distribution of electric currents, ushering in vectorized optoelectronic control in semiconductors.

    • Andrew Forbes

  • News & Views |

    Directly relating the complex second-harmonic-generation field to the second-order susceptibility tensor allows tomographic imaging of nonlinear optical contrast at high frame rates.

    • Paul J. Campagnola

  • News & Views |

    The photovoltaics market has long been dominated by silicon, but further improvements of these solar cells require novel approaches. Now, triplet–triplet annihilation photon upconversion has been used to harvest photons from below the bandgap of silicon, extending the spectral response and potentially improving the efficiency of these cells.

    • Bo Albinsson
    •  & Axel Olesund

  • Article |

    Through the use of a plasmon-active atomically sharp tip and an ultrathin insulating film, and precise junction control in a highly confined nanocavity plasmon field at the scanning tunnelling microscope junction, sub-nanometre-resolved single-molecule near-field photoluminescence imaging with a spatial resolution down to ∼8 Å is achieved.

    • Ben Yang
    • , Gong Chen
    •  & J. G. Hou

  • Article |

    A strong Brillouin amplification per unit length, observed in a gas-filled hollow-core fibre, is used to realize a low-threshold continuous-wave single-frequency laser that can in principle operate at any wavelength and to demonstrate distributed temperature sensing with no strain cross-sensitivity.

    • Fan Yang
    • , Flavien Gyger
    •  & Luc Thévenaz

  • News & Views |

    A correlation method that combines ultrasound and fluorescence enables imaging in strongly scattering environments.

    • Allard P. Mosk

  • News & Views |

    Using a photonic chip to generate the patterns of light needed for structured illumination microscopy could reduce the cost and complexity of super-resolution imaging.

    • Sara Abrahamsson

  • Article |

    A tomographiac approach to second-harmonic-generation imaging on nonlinear structures is demonstrated, with experiments and three-dimensional reconstructions on a beta-barium borate crystal and various biological specimens performed.

    • Chenfei Hu
    • , Jeffrey J. Field
    •  & Gabriel Popescu

  • News & Views |

    Advanced computational imaging techniques have the potential to extract neural activity patterns from scattered data without reconstructing images.

    • Gordon Wetzstein
    •  & Isaac Kauvar

  • Article |

    Carefully designed hollow-core antiresonant fibres support a pair of orthogonal polarization modes with a level of purity and cross-coupling that is orders of magnitude lower than other fibre designs and beyond the fundamental Rayleigh scattering limit of glass core fibres.

    • A. Taranta
    • , E. Numkam Fokoua
    •  & F. Poletti

  • News & Views |

    Dark-field microscopy is a widely used imaging method that emphasizes sharp edges and other small features, but typically requires specialized microscope components. Researchers have now engineered special substrates that enable dark-field microscopy using simple bright-field microscopes.

    • Mikhail A. Kats

  • Article |

    Transscleral optical phase imaging, which is based on transscleral flood illumination of the retina, is demonstrated to provide cellular-resolution, label-free, high-contrast images of the retinal layers over a large field of view without the drawback of a long exposure time.

    • Timothé Laforest
    • , Mathieu Künzi
    •  & Christophe Moser

  • News & Views |

    The combination of high-order harmonic polarimetry and sub-cycle control of electronic trajectories gives insight into the birth of attosecond electronic wave packets in molecules.

    • Giuseppe Sansone

  • News & Views |

    A new light-field imaging scheme, employing stacks of transparent graphene photodetectors, has been demonstrated, providing a path to greatly simplify the otherwise complex three-dimensional imaging.

    • Khurram Shehzad
    •  & Yang Xu

  • Article |

    Vertical integration of a metalens to realize compound nanophotonic systems for optical analog image processing is realized, significantly reducing the size and complexity of conventional optical systems.

    • You Zhou
    • , Hanyu Zheng
    •  & Jason Valentine

  • Letter |

    Using a femtosecond mode-locked laser and a frequency-locked electric signal, a displacement measurement method that offers a >MHz measurement speed, sub-nanometre precision and a measurement range of more than several millimetres is achieved, facilitating the study of broadband, transient and nonlinear mechanical dynamics in real time.

    • Yongjin Na
    • , Chan-Gi Jeon
    •  & Jungwon Kim

  • News & Views |

    Quantitative phase gradient images can now be captured in a single shot thanks to the use of two layers of compact, multifunctional dielectric metasurfaces.

    • YoonSeok Baek
    •  & YongKeun Park

  • Letter |

    A highly transparent photodetector using graphene as the light-sensing layer, conducting channel layer, gate layer and interconnects enables new approaches for light field photodetection and imaging involving simultaneous detection across multiple focal planes.

    • Miao-Bin Lien
    • , Che-Hung Liu
    •  & Theodore B. Norris

  • News & Views |

    A high-intensity attosecond X-ray free-electron laser, meeting the demands of attosecond science for research on the sub-femtosecond-timescale quantum-mechanical motion of electrons in molecules and solids, is now available for attosecond pump–attosecond probe experiments in the soft X-ray region.

    • Heung-Sik Kang
    •  & In Soo Ko

  • News & Views |

    Time-of-flight 3D imaging is an invaluable remote sensing tool, but raster speeds are currently limited by pulsed-laser scanning rates. By adapting techniques from ultrafast time-stretch imaging, a new LiDAR platform scans orders of magnitude faster than today’s commercial line-scanning pulsed-LiDAR systems.

    • Daniel J. Lum

  • News & Views |

    Using graphene as the ‘metal’ layer improves the localization accuracy of metal-induced energy transfer by nearly tenfold.

    • Margarida M. Barroso

  • Comment |

    The arrival of light-emitting diodes based on new materials is posing challenges for the characterization and comparison of devices in a trusted and consistent manner. Here we provide some advice and guidelines that we hope will benefit the community.

    • Miguel Anaya
    • , Barry P. Rand
    •  & Samuel D. Stranks

  • Letter |

    By designing wavefronts in the far field that have optimal properties in the near field, a general framework for optimal micromanipulation with targets of arbitrary shape and in arbitrarily complex environments, such as disordered media, is reported.

    • Michael Horodynski
    • , Matthias Kühmayer
    •  & Stefan Rotter

  • News & Views |

    A wide-field system that can perform video-rate imaging of the entire area of the brain of an awake mouse is aiding the study of neurones, epilepsy and the immune system.

    • Gail McConnell

  • Comment |

    Yaron Silberberg of the Weizmann Institute in Israel passed away in April. Here, some of his former students and friends remind us of who Yaron was: a creative researcher and a mentor without ego with major achievements in nonlinear optics, microscopy and quantum physics.

    • Dan Oron
    • , Nirit Dudovich
    •  & Mordechai (Moti) Segev

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