Optics and photonics articles within Nature Photonics

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  • 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

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A cascaded hard X-ray self-seeding system is demonstrated at the European X-ray free-electron laser. The setup enables millijoule-level pulses in the photon energy range of 6–14 keV at the rate of ten trains per second, with each train including hundreds of pulses arriving at a megahertz repetition rate.

    • Shan Liu
    • , Christian Grech
    •  & Gianluca Geloni

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Continuous-wave conversion of a 13.9 GHz field to a near-infrared optical signal is demonstrated by using Rydberg atoms at room temperature. The conversion bandwidth is 16 MHz and the conversion dynamic range is 57 dB, descending down to 3.8 K noise-equivalent temperature.

    • Sebastian Borówka
    • , Uliana Pylypenko
    •  & Michał Parniak

  • 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

  • News & Views |

    The demonstration of a low-loss diamond mirror cavity that can temporally store X-ray pulses brings hope for a future generation of X-ray free electron lasers.

    • Enrico Allaria
    •  & Giovanni De Ninno

  • News & Views |

    Platforms enabling control over strong light–matter interactions in optical cavities provide a challenging but promising way to manipulate emergent light–matter hybrids. Spin selectivity of transitions has now been demonstrated in a two-dimensional hole gas microcavity system, paving the way towards the study of new spin physics phenomena in hybrid excitations.

    • Hrvoje Buljan
    •  & Zhigang Chen

  • News & Views |

    Precise measurements of the length of an Earth day are essential for understanding global mass transport phenomena. A ring laser gyroscope provides absolute measurements of variations in the length of the day with a resolution of 5 parts per billion over a 14-day period.

    • Caterina Ciminelli
    •  & Giuseppe Brunetti

  • Article |

    Time reflection and refraction are experimentally observed in ultracold atoms. To this end, the time boundary is formed by imposing an abrupt change in the coupling strength of the atomic chain. Time boundary effects are robust against material disorder.

    • Zhaoli Dong
    • , Hang Li
    •  & Bo Yan

  • News & Views |

    Researchers have developed efficient electro-optic tools for manipulating the time and frequency of single photons by taking inspiration from Fresnel lenses.

    • John M. Donohue

  • News & Views |

    A diffractive axicon (a device that diffracts the input light pulse radially) enables complex correlations between the topological charges and the frequencies of ultrashort laser pulses, resulting in a variety of ultrashort coiled light structures.

    • Spencer W. Jolly

  • News & Views |

    The introduction of a two-step deconvolution workflow maximizes the detection of fluorescence in fluctuation-based super-resolution imaging, enabling a square millimetre field of view to be captured in as little as ten minutes.

    • David Baddeley

  • 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

  • Perspective |

    The authors discuss the opportunities and challenges facing underwater photovoltaics.

    • Jason A. Röhr
    • , B. Edward Sartor
    •  & André D. Taylor

  • 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 |

    Attosecond transient reflectivity spectroscopy, in combination with extensive time-dependent density functional theory calculations, is used to study field-driven carrier injection in germanium in the time window of few femtoseconds around pulse overlap, paving a route towards achieving full optical control over charge carriers in semiconductors.

    • Giacomo Inzani
    • , Lyudmyla Adamska
    •  & Matteo Lucchini

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Biphoton digital holography is developed to perform quantum state tomography in a short measurement time. The interference between an unknown and a reference biphoton state is used to retrieve amplitude and phase information through coincidence imaging on a time-stamping camera.

    • Danilo Zia
    • , Nazanin Dehghan
    •  & Ebrahim Karimi

  • News & Views |

    A transmission electron microscopy technique enables movies of optical near-fields to be recorded with a temporal resolution faster than the oscillation of optical electric fields.

    • Yuya Morimoto

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Bright solitons are produced through the interaction of pulse pairs generated via a continuous-wave fibre laser, which pumps two coupled microresonators featuring normal dispersion. Multicolour pulse pairs over multiple rings can also be generated, of great promise for applications such as all-optical soliton buffers and memories, study of quantum combs and topological photonics.

    • Zhiquan Yuan
    • , Maodong Gao
    •  & Kerry Vahala

  • News & Views |

    A lithography-free photonic processor through dynamic control of optical gain distributions is demonstrated, allowing reconfigurable photonic neural networks and more efficient signal processing, and showing great promise in easing data traffic as well as accelerating information processing speeds.

    • Anna P. Ovvyan
    •  & Wolfram H. P. Pernice

  • News & Views |

    Developing cost-efficient, reusable, sensitive, in situ online detection systems for radioactive gases remains challenging. Now researchers show that scintillating metal–organic frameworks can provide a high-performance detector solution.

    • Hong-Tao Sun
    •  & Naoto Shirahata

  • News & Views |

    Contrary to intuition, photons do not have to be indistinguishable for maximum photon bunching to occur. Partially indistinguishable photons can exhibit pronounced bunching.

    • Andrea Crespi

  • Article |

    Natural vibrations of mesoscopic particles, such as living cells, are typically faint; occurring at megahertz to gigahertz frequencies also makes detection challenging. Now, researchers demonstrate real-time measurement of natural vibrations of single mesoscopic particles by using photoacoustic excitation and acoustic coupling to an optical microresonator for readout.

    • Shui-Jing Tang
    • , Mingjie Zhang
    •  & Yun-Feng Xiao

  • 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 |

    An inequality is shown to exist between the spectral directional emissivity and absorptivity in a structure supporting a guided-mode resonance coupled to a magneto-optic material. This finding provides the direct observation of the violation of Kirchhoff’s law of thermal radiation.

    • Komron J. Shayegan
    • , Souvik Biswas
    •  & Harry A. Atwater

  • Article |

    The non-invasive control of light based on incoherent emission from multiple target positions can be achieved by retrieving mutually incoherent scattered fields from speckle patterns, and then time-reversing scattered fluorescence with digital phase conjugation.

    • YoonSeok Baek
    • , Hilton B. de Aguiar
    •  & Sylvain Gigan

  • 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 |

    Tailoring the composition of organic cations enables manipulating the recombination rates of perovskites. Optimized solution-processed perovskite emitters fabricated on silicon exhibit up to 42.6-MHz modulation bandwidth and 50-Mbps data rate.

    • Aobo Ren
    • , Hao Wang
    •  & Wei Zhang

  • 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 |

    Energy consumption and compute density are challenges for computing systems. Here researchers show an optical computing architecture using micrometre-scale VCSEL transmitter arrays enabling 7 fJ energy per operation and a potential compute density of 6 tera-operations mm−2 s−1.

    • Zaijun Chen
    • , Alexander Sludds
    •  & Dirk Englund

  • 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

  • Article |

    When near-infrared femtosecond laser pulses are focused onto a metal wire, relativistic electron acceleration is observed in the attached waveguide. An electron energy gain of 1.1 MeV and an effective acceleration gradient up to 210 MV m−1 are achieved using the laser-induced terahertz surface waves.

    • Xie-Qiu Yu
    • , Yu-Shan Zeng
    •  & Ru-Xin Li

  • 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

  • News & Views |

    The performance of infrared photodiodes designed with narrow-bandgap semiconductors is limited by inherent noise and the need for a low-temperature operation to mitigate it, while they also face a speed–efficiency trade-off.

    • M. Saif Islam

  • News & Views |

    Ultrathin Ti3C2Tx MXene films can approach the intrinsic thin-film absorption limit across the entire 0.5–10 THz band.

    • Ji Liu
    •  & Valeria Nicolosi

  • Article |

    Strong coupling of a 2D hole gas in the quantum Hall state dressed with a microcavity mode is studied, showing that tuning the strength of the magnetic field, and therefore the density of states in the system, can select specific spin-dependent light–matter coupling.

    • D. G. Suárez-Forero
    • , D. W. Session
    •  & M. Hafezi

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