Articles in 2009

An ambient light display based on electrofluidic control of coloured pigment fluids is reported. Electromechanical pressure is used to move the pigment from a reservoir to the entire surface of a pixel on a timescale of tens of milliseconds. The display has a white light reflectivity of 55%.

Evolution of the infrared near-fields of progressively loaded gap antennas is probed using near-field microscopy. The amplitude and phase is shown to be controlled by the antenna loading and the changes can be understood within the framework of circuit theory.

Electrical detection and characterization of gap plasmons is achieved by means of an integrated metal–semiconductor–metal photodetector. Integration of electro–optical components in metallic waveguides may lead to active high-bandwidth on-chip nano-optical circuits.

The first step towards the goal of nuclear fusion triggered by laser beams has been taken with the construction and test firing of the National Ignition Facility in the United States.

By using light to assist the recording process, hard disk drive capacity could potentially be increased by two orders of magnitude. The idea is to heat the magnetic medium locally, thus temporarily lowering its resistance to magnetic polarization.

Imaging through linear media is straightforward, but light beams propagating through nonlinear media become heavily distorted, rendering all usual imaging techniques practically useless. Now, scientists have found a way to recover images transmitted through nonlinear media — by using back-propagation simulations.

Magnetic hard disk technology is approaching its limits. Nature Photonics spoke to William Challener, Ed Gage and Mark Re from Seagate about their demonstration of heat-assisted magnetic recording.

Self-organizing liquid crystals could spawn a new breed of extremely useful and cheap tunable lasers. Such lasers may ultimately prove to be useful for creating flat-screen displays with better colours, enhanced sensors and compact medical instruments. Duncan Graham-Rowe takes a closer look.

Ultrafast all-optical computation with silicon photonic devices is still a dream. New research, which combines organic nonlinear polymers with silicon waveguides, is now bringing that dream closer to reality.

The ability to harness the Faraday effect on a short timescale in an ensemble of hot atoms may prove useful as a read-out tool for quantum information based on microscale vapour cells.

Third-harmonic generation enhanced by slow-light pulses in a photonic crystal waveguide offers a way to generate green light emission from silicon.

Pulse measurement equipment is now easier to use than ever before, with many devices offering easy-to-align solutions and plug-and-play computer operation, reports Neil Savage.

More than one-fifth of US electricity is used to power artificial lighting. Light-emitting diodes based on group III/nitride semiconductors are bringing about a revolution in energy-efficient lighting.

Resonant optical cavities such as Fabry–Perot resonators or whispering-gallery structures are subject to radiation pressure pushing their reflecting 'walls' apart. Deformable optical cavities yield to this pressure, but in doing so they in turn affect the stored optical energy, resulting in an optical back-action. For such cavities the optics and the mechanics become strongly coupled, making them fascinating systems in which to explore theories of measurements at the quantum limit. Here we provide a summary of the current state of optomechanics of deformable optical cavities, identifying some of the most important recent developments in the field.

The use of slow light for enhancing a nonlinear optical process in a two-dimensional silicon photonic-crystal waveguide is demonstrated. More specifically, green emission by third-harmonic generation is obtained, highlighting yet another functionality of silicon photonics chips.