Ultrafast photonics articles within Nature Photonics

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  • Article |

    A terahertz-driven photogun with field gradients of 3 GV m−1 is demonstrated by using a few microjoules of single-cycle terahertz radiation. The emitted electrons are accelerated up to 14 keV and can be focused down to 90 μm. The electron bunch is further compressed to 167 fs.

    • Jianwei Ying
    • , Xie He
    •  & Dongfang Zhang

  • News & Views |

    Sub-cycle confinement and control of phase transitions in strongly correlated materials are theoretically demonstrated, potentially providing a way to investigate electron dynamics on timescales previously unattainable with these materials.

    • Eleftherios Goulielmakis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Time-resolved lightwave-driven scanning tunnelling spectroscopy is developed to investigate how the spin–orbit-split energy levels of a selenium vacancy within a WSe2 monolayer shift under phonon displacement. Ultrafast snapshots of the electronic tunnelling spectra reveal transient energy shifts up to 40 meV.

    • C. Roelcke
    • , L. Z. Kastner
    •  & Y. A. Gerasimenko

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A reflective spatial light modulator for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) or soft X-ray light is demonstrated in an electronic Wigner crystal material with a sub-90-nm feature size. The diffraction grating imprinted by sub-picosecond EUV beams is rewritable. The projected efficiency according to the modelling exceeds 1%.

    • Igor Vaskivskyi
    • , Anze Mraz
    •  & Dragan Mihailovic

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Nonlinear multidimensional spectroscopy that can image the sub-cycle dynamics of strongly correlated systems on the sub-femtosecond timescale is demonstrated by using the carrier–envelope-phase dependence of the correlated multielectron response to decode the complex interplay between different many-body states.

    • V. N. Valmispild
    • , E. Gorelov
    •  & O. Smirnova

  • Article |

    Using a self-referenced attosecond photoelectron interferometry on helium atoms, the electron subcycle motion along the light propagation direction is observed in the 15 pm range. A time delay of 15 ± 10 as between the electric-dipole and electric-quadrupole transitions is also revealed.

    • Jintai Liang
    • , Meng Han
    •  & Hans Jakob Wörner

  • 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 |

    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

  • 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

  • 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 |

    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

  • Article |

    To bridge the ultrafast and slow classes of quantum-information-processing systems, a Fresnel time lens is developed by using a wideband electro-optic phase modulator combined with a dispersion element. The single-photon spectral bandwidth is compressed from picosecond to nanosecond timescales.

    • Filip Sośnicki
    • , Michał Mikołajczyk
    •  & Michał Karpiński

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A terawatt laser filament is shown to be able to guide lightning over a distance of 50 m in field trials on the Säntis mountain in the Swiss Alps.

    • Aurélien Houard
    • , Pierre Walch
    •  & Jean-Pierre Wolf

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A nonlinear multi-pass cell is shown to be able to shift the central wavelength of a laser by tens of nanometres, offering a new means for control for high-power laser systems

    • Prannay Balla
    • , Henrik Tünnermann
    •  & Christoph M. Heyl

  • Letter |

    Researchers exploit the quadratic nonlinearity of lithium niobate nanowaveguides and demonstrate cavity-free all-optical switching. Switching energies down to 80 fJ, switching times down to ~46 fs and energy–time products of 3.7 × 10−27 J s are shown.

    • Qiushi Guo
    • , Ryoto Sekine
    •  & Alireza Marandi

  • Article |

    Pulses of light with a toroidal structure are experimentally realized in the terahertz and optical regions.

    • Apostolos Zdagkas
    • , Cormac McDonnell
    •  & Nikolay I. Zheludev

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A new solution to Maxwell’s equations, photonic toroidal vortex, is experimentally realized.

    • Chenhao Wan
    • , Qian Cao
    •  & Qiwen Zhan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Continuously adjustable single-cycle waveform spanning from 0.9 to 12.0 μm is obtained by cascaded intrapulse difference-frequency generation in a ZnGeP2 crystal. The cascade-associated phase response—distinct for different spectral bands—provides a new tuning parameter for waveform adjustment.

    • Philipp Steinleitner
    • , Nathalie Nagl
    •  & Ka Fai Mak

  • Article |

    The formation of ultra-short dissipative quadratic solitons is realized using optical parametric amplification at low pump energies and in the presence of substantial temporal walk-off between the pump and signal.

    • Arkadev Roy
    • , Rajveer Nehra
    •  & Alireza Marandi

  • News & Views |

    A sub-cycle modulation in reflectivity is observed in bulk crystals subjected to intense laser fields. The effect provides a new way to probe attosecond dynamics in materials.

    • Shambhu Ghimire

  • Article |

    Light-field-induced electron dynamics in a silicon dioxide dielectric system are exploited to directly measure the attosecond relative electronic delay response in the dielectric system, potentially extending the speed of data processing and information encoding into the petahertz realm.

    • Dandan Hui
    • , Husain Alqattan
    •  & Mohammed Th. Hassan

  • News & Views |

    The direct generation of femtosecond pulses from an 8-μm quantum cascade laser could prove transformative for sensing and spectroscopy.

    • Sukhdeep Dhillon

  • Article |

    Near-transform-limited 630 fs pulses with 4.5 W of peak power are generated by compensating the dispersion of a quantum cascade laser emitting around 8 μm. Their temporal nature is assessed by a new method called asynchronous upconversion sampling.

    • Philipp Täschler
    • , Mathieu Bertrand
    •  & Jérôme Faist

  • Article
    | Open Access

    By sandwiching a germanium fin between complementary in situ-doped silicon layers, a waveguide-coupled germanium photodiode with a 3-dB bandwidth of 265 GHz, accompanied by high responsivity and low dark current, is realized.

    • S. Lischke
    • , A. Peczek
    •  & L. Zimmermann

  • Letter |

    Using a gas-filled anti-resonant-reflection photonic-crystal fibre, a high-brightness table-top source of coherent carrier-envelope-phase-stable waveforms is demonstrated across seven octaves (340 nm to 40,000 nm) with ultraviolet peak powers up to 2.5 MW and terahertz peak powers of 1.8 MW, without the need for changing nonlinear crystals.

    • Ugaitz Elu
    • , Luke Maidment
    •  & Jens Biegert

  • Article |

    Ultrafast lightwave sampling based on scanning tunnelling microscopy is developed to resolve near fields with sub-picosecond time resolution and sub-nanometre spatial resolution. Parameter-free quantitative measurement is achieved by using a single-molecule switch.

    • D. Peller
    • , C. Roelcke
    •  & J. Repp

  • News & Views |

    Unexpected multimode solitary waves can be formed spontaneously in hollow-core fibres, hinting at a vast world of exciting nonlinear optics, with applications for generating few-cycle, ultra-intense pulses.

    • Logan G. Wright
    •  & Frank W. Wise

  • 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

  • Article |

    The formation of multidimensional solitary states through the nonlinear propagation of high-energy pulses in a molecular gas-filled large-core hollow-core fibre is demonstrated, offering new opportunities for studying multimodal spatiotemporal dynamics in the high-energy regime.

    • Reza Safaei
    • , Guangyu Fan
    •  & François Légaré

  • News & Views |

    Launching electrons to the centre of an optical field with a vortex phase profile via extreme-ultraviolet photoionization makes coherent imprinting of the spatial distribution of the vortex beam onto the electron wave packet possible.

    • Olga Smirnova

  • News & Views |

    Technology borrowed from electron accelerator and beam physics looks set to push the performance of ultrafast-electron-diffraction-based pump–probe studies of matter.

    • Pietro Musumeci

  • Letter |

    Femtosecond laser pulses are sent to a graphene/SiC interface to investigate photoinduced charge transfer from graphene to SiC. A charge transfer time of 300 attoseconds is obtained via laser-pulse-duration-dependent saturation fluence determination.

    • Christian Heide
    • , Martin Hauck
    •  & Peter Hommelhoff

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