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The journey to realize a terahertz quantum cascade laser that operates at room temperature has taken a jump forward with news of a device that operates at –23 °C, within the reach of Peltier coolers.
Two independent reports of directly modulated lasers with bandwidths of >60 GHz may help bring data rates beyond 200 Gb s–1 to low-cost optical communication systems. Key to the successes has been managing photonic feedback effects within the laser cavities.
The first demonstration of an optical parametric oscillator using a photonic crystal microcavity is promising for the future development of on-chip light sources for applications in integrated quantum optics.
The manipulation of the quantum properties of light involves its technically challenging strong interaction with matter. Now, an experiment shows that when light propagates through a waveguide it only takes a weakly coupled line of atoms to single out its photons, or bunch them together, unveiling and controlling its quantum nature.
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.
Facilities generating coherent X-rays tend to be large scale and costly. Now researchers have demonstrated a parametric and coherent laboratory-scale X-ray source by passing moderately energetic electrons through van der Waals heterostructures.
The limited control of electrons by light has resulted in photonic-driven circuits lagging far behind their electronic counterparts. Now, a technique exploiting coherent control with structured light has been used to sculpt the spatial distribution of electric currents, ushering in vectorized optoelectronic control in semiconductors.
Two independent studies report new organic compounds that offer record rates of reverse intersystem crossing between triplet and singlet excited states. The result is sky-blue organic light-emitting diodes with improved efficiency, stability and reduced efficiency roll-off.
The integration of diamond waveguide arrays into an aluminium nitride photonic platform offers hope for the realization of scalable chips for quantum information processing.
Gold atoms are stripped of 72 of their electrons to form nitrogen-like Au72+ ions inside extremely hot plasmas by irradiating gold foils and nanowires with highly relativistic femtosecond laser pulses.
Using topological singular points, the topological charge of photonic crystals in momentum space is successfully transferred to optical vortex beams in real space.
The photovoltaics market has long been dominated by silicon, but further improvements of these solar cells require novel approaches. Now, triplet–triplet annihilation photon upconversion has been used to harvest photons from below the bandgap of silicon, extending the spectral response and potentially improving the efficiency of these cells.
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.
Directly relating the complex second-harmonic-generation field to the second-order susceptibility tensor allows tomographic imaging of nonlinear optical contrast at high frame rates.
