Other photonics articles within Nature Photonics

Featured

  • News & Views |

    Green fluorescent protein — an important biological imaging tool for many years — now forms the foundation of the first cellular laser.

    • Steve Meech

  • Letter |

    Scientists demonstrate living biological lasers by pumping cells containing green fluorescent protein in a highly reflective microcavity. The researchers also investigate the thresholds and modes of their cellular lasers.

    • Malte C. Gather
    •  & Seok Hyun Yun

  • Commentary |

    Optical tweezers have become one of the primary weapons in the arsenal of biophysicists, and have revolutionized the new field of single-molecule biophysics. Today's techniques allow high-resolution experiments on biological macromolecules that were mere pipe dreams only a decade ago.

    • Furqan M Fazal
    •  & Steven M Block

  • Editorial |

    Frequency combs, optical clocks and quantum techniques that go beyond classical limits are all making photonics a powerful tool for understanding and defining our universe in ever-greater detail.

  • Interview |

    Frequency combs generated by femtosecond lasers are powerful tools for high-precision optical spectroscopy and metrology. Theodor Hänsch, who received part of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2005 for his work in this field, spoke to Nature Photonics about how frequency combs have changed science.

    • Noriaki Horiuchi

  • Commentary |

    This year celebrates the twentieth anniversary of frequency-resolved optical gating — the first and most general technique for measuring ultrashort laser pulses.

    • Rick Trebino

  • Letter |

    Based on peristaltic nematogen microflows in polydimethylsiloxane, scientists demonstrate an optofluidic modulator that exhibits a symmetric 250 µs response and can operate at frequencies of up to 1 kHz.

    • J. G. Cuennet
    • , A. E. Vasdekis
    •  & D. Psaltis

  • Industry Perspective |

    The advent of ophthalmic imaging instruments equipped with adaptive optics technology now makes it possible to visualize the retina at the cellular level, allowing the early detection of eye diseases.

    • Mark Zacharria
    • , Barbara Lamory
    •  & Nicolas Chateau

  • Article |

    Researchers demonstrate a probabilistic noiseless linear amplifier based on photon addition and subtraction. The technique enables coherent states to be amplified to the highest levels of effective gain and final-state fidelity, and could become an essential tool for applications in quantum communication and metrology.

    • A. Zavatta
    • , J. Fiurášek
    •  & M. Bellini

  • News & Views |

    Exploiting the self-healing properties of Bessel beams, scientists demonstrate a microscope that offers better image quality and deeper penetration in dense media than current imaging schemes.

    • Miles Padgett

  • Product Focus |

    Using high-frequency sound waves to make tunable optical filters, modulators and Q-switches is a well-established and convenient technological solution for many applications, reports Neil Savage.

    • Neil Savage

  • News & Views |

    An infrared laser pacemaker that can optically synchronize the beat of an embryonic heart shows great promise for developmental biology, and perhaps ultimately for use as a pacemaker in humans.

    • Nicholas I. Smith

  • Letter |

    The ability of pulsed near-infrared laser light to pace the heart beat of a quail embryo is demonstrated, suggesting that such optical pacing may become a useful tool for developmental cardiology.

    • M. W. Jenkins
    • , A. R. Duke
    •  & A. M. Rollins

  • News & Views |

    Frequency combs are created by stabilizing the evolution of the carrier–envelope phase of a mode-locked laser. Researchers have now demonstrated a simplified method of creating frequency combs that enables trains of identical pulses to be easily produced.

    • Steven T. Cundiff

  • News & Views |

    Packets of light persisting in a continuously driven nonlinear resonator in the time domain offer new possibilities not only for applications in all-optical storage, pulse reshaping and wavelength conversion, but also for fundamental experiments in nonlinear science.

    • William Firth

  • Letter |

    Scientists demonstrate a simple self-referenced feed-forward approach for stabilizing the carrier–envelope phase of femtosecond light pulses. Twelve attoseconds of residual timing jitter below the atomic unit of time is achieved, surpassing the precision of previous methods by more than a factor of five.

    • Sebastian Koke
    • , Christian Grebing
    •  & Günter Steinmeyer

  • Letter |

    By exploiting the Keldysh scaling — universal wavelength scaling laws in strong-field physics — direct temporal characterization of high-harmonics is demonstrated using sum-frequency-generation cross-correlation frequency-resolved optical gating (SFG XFROG).

    • Erik P. Power
    • , Anne Marie March
    •  & Louis F. DiMauro

  • Article |

    Researchers overcome the propagation loss of surface-plasmon polaritons, with this demonstration being the first direct gain measurement of propagating plasmons. Low-loss long-range modes of a metal stripe waveguide are amplified by using optically pumped dye molecules in solution as the gain medium. The mode power gain was measured to be 8.55 dB mm−1.

    • Israel De Leon
    •  & Pierre Berini

  • Article |

    Precise spatial characterization of the origin of light emission from organic light-emitting diodes is important for improving the design of future devices and gaining valuable insight into their operation. Here, a characterization scheme that achieves this task with a spatial resolution better than 5 nm is reported.

    • S. L. M. van Mensfoort
    • , M. Carvelli
    •  & R. Coehoorn

  • Article |

    A measurement scheme that is capable of recording the amplitude and phase of arbitrary shaped optical waveforms with a bandwidth of up to 160 GHz is presented. The approach is compatible with integration on a silicon photonic chip and could aid the study of transient ultrafast phenomena.

    • Nicolas K. Fontaine
    • , Ryan P. Scott
    •  & S. J. B. Yoo

  • News & Views |

    By combining the output from two synchronized light sources, single-cycle laser pulses at the telecommunications wavelength of 1.5 μm have been successfully generated. The achievement is set to benefit ultrafast optical spectroscopy and attosecond science.

    • Uwe Morgner

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