News & Comment

Light can now be used to raise a wing-shaped refractive object, in a technique analogous to aerodynamic lift. Grover Swartzlander from the Rochester Institute of Technology in the USA told Nature Photonics how his team achieved optical lift using a uniform collimated beam of light.

The SLAC Linac Coherent Light Source is now the world's brightest source of coherent ångström-wavelength X-rays. Paul Emma, the man who made this achievement possible, spoke to Nature Photonics about the challenges involved.

Imaging the transient carrier dynamics in semiconductors at both high temporal and spatial resolution has long been a goal for solid-state scientists. Hidemi Shigekawa from the University of Tsukuba in Japan told Nature Photonics how his team accomplished this feat.

Munisamy Anandan, president of the Society for Information Display, talks to Rebecca Pool about the breath-taking technologies that are now emerging in the displays market.

By exploiting optical quantum interference in integrated atomic vapour cells, Holger Schmidt and co-workers have achieved the slowest on-chip light propagation speed reported to date.

A regenerator capable of simultaneously removing both phase and amplitude noise from an optical data stream may be a critical component of future optical networks. Radan Slavík explained to Nature Photonics how he and his co-workers realized such a device.

A scheme for the remote sensing of terahertz waves over distances of tens of metres could have important applications in security and biology. Xi-Cheng Zhang from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute spoke toNature Photonicsabout his group's latest work in this field.

Belgian research institute imec is uniquely capable of manufacturing both polymer and small-molecule organic photovoltaic technology.Nadya Anscombetalks to Tom Aernouts, team leader of the organic photovoltaic division at imec, about these competing technologies.

Can excitons be used to achieve scalable control of quantum light? Steffen Michaelis de Vasconcellos explained toNature Photonicsthat the optoelectrical control of exciton qubits in quantum dots offers great promise.

Mario Paniccia, Intel fellow and director of Intel's Photonics Technology Lab, talks to Nature Photonics about the company's progress in commercializing high-speed silicon photonics.

The photonic sensors market is a diverse and fragmented one. David Krohn, chair of the Optoelectronics Industry Development Association's Photonic Sensor Consortium, tells Nadya Anscombe that the difference between success and failure often depends on understanding your market.

Time-domain cavity solitons could be a promising candidate for creating all-optical buffers integrated with pulse reshapers and wavelength converters. Stéphane Coen spoke with Nature Photonics about the generation of these solitons and their potential applications in telecommunications.

Can new types of organic semiconductor lasers offer low-power and coherent integrated sources? Stephen Forrest explains that his team's room-temperature polariton laser gives a reason to be optimistic.

Will graphene optoelectronics be able to displace silicon technology? Thomas Mueller explains that a new design of graphene photodetector is showing great promise.

Nadya Anscombe talks to Charles Townes, Nobel Prize winner and inventor of the maser, the forerunner to the laser, to find out how the invention of the laser came about and how he struggled to convince people of its importance.

Accurate characterization of ultrafast optical pulses is important for applications such as spectroscopy and communications research. S. J. Ben Yoo from the University of California at Davis explains his team's scheme for real-time measurement of the amplitude and phase of arbitrary and non-repetitive waveforms.

Andreas Stingl, CEO of Austrian company Femtolasers, talks to Nadya Anscombe about the market for femtosecond lasers and their wide variety of applications.

A new method for designing aperiodic volume optical elements will offer researchers more degrees of freedom in the design of optical devices. Rafael Piestun explained to Nature Photonics how this method may lead to a myriad of applications in beam-shaping and imaging.

Generating 3D light packets that propagate without dispersing in time or space is not an easy task. Andy Chong from Cornell University told Nature Photonics how he and his co-workers came up with a simple and versatile approach to this problem.

Few-cycle light pulses are important for attosecond science and extremely nonlinear optics. Alfred Leitenstorfer from the University of Konstanz spoke to Nature Photonics about how erbium-doped fibre laser technology can generate single-cycle pulses at telecommunications wavelengths.