Other photonics articles within Nature Physics

Featured

  • Perspective |

    Although topological photonics has been an active field of research for some time, most studies still focus on the linear optical regime. This Perspective summarizes recent investigations into the nonlinear properties of discrete topological photonic systems.

    • Alexander Szameit
    •  & Mikael C. Rechtsman

  • 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 |

    Trojan beams, which are optical counterparts of Trojan asteroids that maintain stable orbits alongside planets, have been successfully showcased in experiments, opening up possibilities for transporting light in unconventional settings.

    • Tomáš Tyc
    •  & Tomáš Čižmár

  • News & Views |

    A decade ago, the anti-laser made waves as a new type of perfect absorber that functions as a one-way trap door for light. Experiments have now demonstrated the control of light without absorbing it.

    • A. Douglas Stone

  • 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

  • News & Views |

    Time-varying photonics constitutes an emerging concept where a material’s time-dependence is used to achieve novel functionalities. A temporal double-slit-diffraction experiment demonstrates the feasibility of time-modulating materials to control light.

    • Francisco J. Rodríguez-Fortuño

  • Article |

    de Broglie–Mackinnon wave packets are an extension of matter waves, but have so far remained a theoretical construct. Combining spatio-temporal light fields with anomalous dispersion has now allowed their experimental observation.

    • Layton A. Hall
    •  & Ayman F. Abouraddy

  • News & Views |

    Ultrafast laser fields are able to widely tune the physical properties of semiconductors by generating virtual states. Using strong fields at energies below the optical bandgap, control of excitons in two-dimensional semiconductors has now been demonstrated.

    • Ioannis Paradisanos
    •  & Bernhard Urbaszek

  • Letter
    | Open Access

    Photonic waveguides with appropriately engineered interactions allow the experimental realization of non-Abelian quantum holonomies of the symmetry group U(3), which is known from the strong nuclear force.

    • Vera Neef
    • , Julien Pinske
    •  & Alexander Szameit

  • Perspective |

    Multiple scattering of light in complex and disordered media scrambles optical information. This Perspective showcases how this often detrimental physical mixing can be exploited to extract and process information for optical imaging and computing.

    • Sylvain Gigan

  • 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

  • News & Views |

    Light propagating in the topological edge channel of an array of ring resonators is predicted to generate nested frequency combs: like a Matryoshka doll containing a set of smaller dolls, each ‘tooth’ of the comb comprises another frequency comb.

    • Vittorio Peano

  • 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

  • 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

  • Article |

    A pair of strongly coupled photonic microresonators shows nonlinear emergent behaviour, which can be understood by incorporating interactions in the theoretical description of nonlinear optical systems.

    • A. Tikan
    • , J. Riemensberger
    •  & T. J. Kippenberg

  • 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

  • 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 |

    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

  • Article |

    The realization of a two-dimensional quadrupole topological insulator—featuring gapless corner states but an otherwise insulating bulk and edge—establishes electrical circuits as a versatile platform for implementing topological band structures.

    • Stefan Imhof
    • , Christian Berger
    •  & Ronny Thomale

  • Letter |

    The authors theoretically investigate a novel form of a Doppler effect in homogeneous systems with positive refractive index that occurs under certain conditions. It is suggested that this Doppler effect can be experimentally separated from other Doppler effects by using polaritons such as those found in graphene.

    • Xihang Shi
    • , Xiao Lin
    •  & Baile Zhang

  • News & Views |

    Light can be coupled to sound via Brillouin scattering, but realizing an efficient interaction isn’t trivial. A new type of resonator succeeds in doing so in a macroscopic device — boasting features that better its nanoscale counterparts.

    • Jeremy Bourhill
    •  & Michael E. Tobar

  • News & Views |

    By engineering photosensitive proteins and tweaking the classical properties of light, it should be possible to tune the response of a cell equipped with photoreceptors. But would these cells be able to sense the subtle quantum properties of light?

    • Elisabetta Collini

  • Letter |

    The demonstration of a direct correlation between an optical stimulus and the biological function of a photoreceptor in living brain tissue charts the course for designing tailored pulses to control molecular dynamics in vivo.

    • Kush Paul
    • , Parijat Sengupta
    •  & Stephen A. Boppart

  • Measure for Measure |

    Optical-lattice clocks have pushed the limits of frequency measurement — to such an extent that a tiny difference in altitude affects the clock's tick rate, as Hidetoshi Katori elucidates.

    • Hidetoshi Katori

  • Letter |

    A theoretical study looks at the interplay between disorder and chiral symmetry in the photon statistics in a one-dimensional photonic lattice, predicting that for increased disorder coherent light becomes thermal.

    • H. Esat Kondakci
    • , Ayman F. Abouraddy
    •  & Bahaa E. A. Saleh

  • Letter |

    Random lasers generate the optical feedback required for stimulated emission by scattering light from disordered particles. Their inherent randomness, however, makes controlling the emission wavelength difficult. It is now shown that this problem can be remedied by carefully matching the pump laser to the specific random medium. The concept is applied to a one-dimensional optofluidic device, but could also be applicable to other random lasers.

    • Nicolas Bachelard
    • , Sylvain Gigan
    •  & Patrick Sebbah

  • Commentary |

    The latest generation of optical atomic clocks has reached such a degree of accuracy that questions about the need to redefine the second are raised. But even without such a redefinition, these breakthroughs will enable unprecedented precision tests of fundamental physics.

    • Helen Margolis

  • News & Views |

    A combination of two Nobel ideas circumvents the trade-off between power and accuracy in ultraviolet spectroscopy.

    • Scott A. Diddams

  • Letter |

    Frequency combs provide a broad series of well-calibrated spectral lines for highly precise metrology and spectroscopy, but this usually involves a trade-off between power and accuracy. A comb created by adjusting the time delay between two optical pulses now enables both. This so-called Ramsey comb could probe fundamental problems such as determining the size of the proton.

    • Jonas Morgenweg
    • , Itan Barmes
    •  & Kjeld S. E. Eikema

  • Article |

    Photonic crystals efficiently control wave propagation on a wavelength scale, but this means they can become very large when long wavelengths are involved. Metamaterials made of resonant unit cells can confine and guide waves even at scales far below their wavelength.

    • Fabrice Lemoult
    • , Nadège Kaina
    •  & Geoffroy Lerosey

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