Optics and photonics articles within Nature Physics

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  • Article |

    Topological materials are characterized by the topological invariants of filled bands, which cannot be used for bosonic systems. Instead, their topological invariants can be found via the transition from bound to leaky modes in photonic lattices.

    • Daniel Leykam
    •  & Daria A. Smirnova

  • Article |

    By exploiting polarization entanglement between photons, quantum holography can circumvent the need for first-order coherence that is vital to classical holography.

    • Hugo Defienne
    • , Bienvenu Ndagano
    •  & Daniele Faccio

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Evidence for light-induced superconductivity in K3C60 was limited to optical methods due to the short lifetime of the phase. Extending the lifetime from picoseconds to nanoseconds now allows measurement of its negligible electrical resistance.

    • M. Budden
    • , T. Gebert
    •  & A. Cavalleri

  • News & Views |

    Among the many reasons a signal may deviate from perfect periodicity, quantum-limited jitter is arguably the most fundamental. A clever experiment has now stripped away technical noise to unveil quantum-limited jitter of ultrafast soliton frequency combs.

    • Miro Erkintalo

  • 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

  • Letter |

    Wavefront shaping can reduce uncertainties due to measurement noise through disordered media—key to many imaging applications. Optimal precision can be achieved using light fields that are eigenstates of an operator related to the medium’s scattering matrix.

    • Dorian Bouchet
    • , Stefan Rotter
    •  & Allard P. Mosk

  • Article |

    Self-referenced attosecond streaking enables in situ measurements of Auger emission in atomic neon excited by femtosecond pulses from an X-ray free-electron laser with subfemtosecond time resolution and despite the jitter inherent to X-ray free-electron lasers.

    • D. C. Haynes
    • , M. Wurzer
    •  & A. L. Cavalieri

  • Article |

    A general approach to derive direction-dependent complex refractive indices close to zero produces infinite families of time-reversible and infinite families of time-irreversible electromagnetic materials, without invoking the concept of topology.

    • S. A. R. Horsley
    •  & M. Woolley

  • News & Views |

    Observing accreting black holes in the early Universe allows precise comparison of clocks over intercontinental distances on Earth. This is achieved with a novel observation strategy using the next generation of very long baseline interferometry systems.

    • Rüdiger Haas

  • Letter |

    The coherence of a close-to-ideal laser beam can be quadratically better than what was believed to be the quantum limit. This new Heisenberg limit could be attained with circuit quantum electrodynamics.

    • Travis J. Baker
    • , Seyed N. Saadatmand
    •  & Howard M. Wiseman

  • 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 |

    Inertial dynamics are observed in a ferromagnet. Specifically, a nutation is seen on top of the usual spin precession that has a lifetime on the order of 10 picoseconds.

    • Kumar Neeraj
    • , Nilesh Awari
    •  & Stefano Bonetti

  • News & Views |

    An atomic spin oscillator coupled to a mechanical membrane resonator forms an effective negative-mass oscillator. Entanglement in this hybrid quantum system is created by a backaction-evading position measurement, despite the macroscopic separation.

    • Brian D’Urso
    •  & James Millen

  • Article |

    The non-zero geometric phase acquired by the braiding of vortex modes in photonic waveguide lattices demonstrates their potential to serve as a platform for the study of both Abelian and non-Abelian braiding in bosonic systems.

    • Jiho Noh
    • , Thomas Schuster
    •  & Mikael C. Rechtsman

  • Letter |

    Electrons and holes in doped quantum wells cannot form bound states from usual Coulomb interaction. However, when the system is embedded in a cavity, the exchange of photons provides an effective attraction, leading to the creation of bound excitons.

    • Erika Cortese
    • , Ngoc-Linh Tran
    •  & Simone De Liberato

  • Article |

    Higher-dimensional entanglement between two photons can be preserved for a photon passing through a complex medium by applying an appropriate scrambling operation on the entangled partner that does not enter the complex medium.

    • Natalia Herrera Valencia
    • , Suraj Goel
    •  & Mehul Malik

  • Article |

    An adaptive heterodyne technique with a Josephson parametric amplifier detector allows a high-precision single-shot canonical phase measurement on a one-photon wave packet, complementing near-ideal measurements of photon number or field amplitude.

    • Leigh S. Martin
    • , William P. Livingston
    •  & Irfan Siddiqi

  • News & Views |

    Squeezed light is useful for metrology and quantum information. An optomechanical squeezed light source that works at room temperature will facilitate the technological applications of quantum light.

    • André Xuereb

  • News & Views |

    Quantum cascade lasers are bright and compact semiconductor lasers that emit light in the mid- to far-infrared spectral region. The use of a closed ring cavity has now set them on the path towards ultrafast pulses.

    • Johann Riemensberger

  • Letter |

    Error-corrected quantum gates that can tolerate dominant errors during the execution of quantum operations have been demonstrated. Substantial improvement of the gate fidelity sheds light on fault-tolerant universal quantum computation.

    • Philip Reinhold
    • , Serge Rosenblum
    •  & Robert J. Schoelkopf

  • Letter |

    Transmitting the time signal and generating the secure key with the same carrier photon improves the security of a satellite-based quantum-secure time transfer protocol, which uses two-way quantum key distribution.

    • Hui Dai
    • , Qi Shen
    •  & Jian-Wei Pan

  • Measure for Measure |

    The tool of choice to measure optical frequencies with extremely high precision is the optical frequency comb. Camille-Sophie Brès explains what makes this technique so powerful.

    • Camille-Sophie Brès

  • Letter |

    A passive, heralded and high-fidelity quantum memory network node has been realized, which connects simultaneously to two quantum channels provided by orthogonally aligned optical fibre cavities coupled with a single atom.

    • Manuel Brekenfeld
    • , Dominik Niemietz
    •  & Gerhard Rempe

  • Article |

    A kind of quantum metasurface made of an atom array is proposed, providing the possibility to control both spatiotemporal and quantum properties of transmitted and reflected light.

    • R. Bekenstein
    • , I. Pikovski
    •  & M. D. Lukin

  • Article |

    Measurements of non-Hermitian photon dynamics show boundary-localized bulk eigenstates given by the non-Hermitian skin effect. A fundamental revision of the bulk–boundary correspondence in open systems is required to understand the underlying physics.

    • Lei Xiao
    • , Tianshu Deng
    •  & Peng Xue

  • Article |

    The modes of the radiation field generated from an emitter are usually determined by the eigenstates of the surrounding environment. However, this scenario breaks down in a non-Hermitian system, at the spectral degeneracy known as an exceptional point.

    • Hua-Zhou Chen
    • , Tuo Liu
    •  & Ren-Min Ma

  • News & Views |

    Speed is of the essence when it comes to signal processing, but electronic switching times have reached a limit. Optically controlled tunnel currents across a nanoscale plasmonic gap could considerably accelerate future nanoelectronic devices.

    • Olga Smirnova

  • News & Views |

    Despite the wide use of mode-locked lasers, no general theory for mode-locking exists. An attractor dissection approach provides some intuitive understanding of the complex dynamics in one type of mode-locking.

    • F. Ömer Ilday

  • Letter |

    Light-induced deformations in a film of superfluid helium covering an optical microresonator can greatly enhance Brillouin interactions, enabling strong coupling between counter-propagating modes as well as Brillouin lasing.

    • Xin He
    • , Glen I. Harris
    •  & Warwick P. Bowen

  • 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 |

    The variational quantum unsampling protocol provides a way to realize verification and inference of near-term quantum circuit outputs. This protocol is then experimentally verified on a quantum photonic processor.

    • Jacques Carolan
    • , Masoud Mohseni
    •  & Dirk Englund

  • 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

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