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  • 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
    ArticleOpen Access
  • 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
    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
  • 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
  • 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
    ArticleOpen Access
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
    Article