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An evanescent single-molecule biosensor that operates at the fundamental precision limit, allowing a four-order-of-magnitude reduction in optical intensity while maintaining state-of-the-art sensitivity, is demonstrated.
A nanofibre optic force transducer with 0.2 pN sensitivity is demonstrated. The set-up is used to monitor bacterial motion, observe heart cell beating and detect infrasound power in solution.
By exploiting one-dimensional photonic crystal nanocavities, an ultra-compact indium phosphide-on-silicon laser diode with low current threshold, high wall-plug efficiency and high integrability is demonstrated.
Researchers use hyperbolic metamaterials to make an integrated Cherenkov light source and relax the electron energy requirements. Radiation covering the visible range and near-infrared is achieved with electron energies of only 0.25–1.4 keV.
A laser–plasma accelerator delivering 5-MeV electrons at kHz repetition rate is demonstrated. It is achieved in the laser-wakefield-acceleration regime by using a multi-mJ laser system delivering near-single-cycle laser pulses of 3.4-fs duration.
The conversion of shaped near-infrared pulses to shaped, energetic, multi-octave-spanning mid-infrared pulses lasting as little as 1.2 optical cycles is made possible by adiabatic difference frequency generation.
The temporal structure of the polarization and carrier-envelope phase slip of high-harmonic waveforms generated in bulk gallium selenide within the duration of a single multi-terahertz driving pulse can be controlled by the crystal symmetry.
The Kerr effect in graded-index multimode fibres drives a spatial beam self-cleaning phenomenon that withstands fibre bending and does not necessitate dissipative processes such as stimulated scattering.
A passively mode-locked laser system featuring cavity filtering and cavity-enhanced nonlinear interactions within an integrated microring resonator produces nanosecond optical pulses with a spectral width of 104.9 MHz.
Previous demonstrations of the elusive Casimir force between interfaces exhibit monotonic dependence on surface displacement. Now a non-monotonic dependence of the force has been shown experimentally by exploting nanostructured surfaces.
Due to their nature antiferromagnets are difficult to probe with conventional magnetometers. The Néel vector of a practically important antiferromagnet, CuMnAs, has now been determined by a femtosecond pump–probe magneto-optical experiment.