Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
The use of a thin layer of zinc oxide nanoparticles as an electron-transport layer allows flexible perovskite solar cells to be fabricated with a power conversion efficiency as high as 15.7%.
Highly efficient perovskite solar cells have been fabricated by using room-temperature deposition processes. The cells are based on a layer of methylammonium lead iodide perovskite that is prepared by sublimation in a high-vacuum chamber and sandwiched between two thin organic charge-transport layers.
Temporal dissipative solitons are observed in a nonlinear, high-finesse, optical microresonator driven by a continuous-wave laser. This approach enables ultrashort pulses to be generated in spectral regimes lacking broadband laser gain media and saturable absorbers, making it potentially useful for applications in broadband spectroscopy, telecommunications, astronomy and low-phase-noise microwave generation.
Single-step fabrication of a multimode quantum resource from the parametric downconversion of femtosecond frequency combs is demonstrated. Each of the 511 possible bipartitions among ten spectral regions is shown to be entangled. Furthermore, an eigenmode decomposition reveals that eight independent quantum channels (qumodes) are subsumed within the comb.
Simultaneous detection of electric and magnetic fields with a subwavelength resolution is achieved by a near-field scanning approach. Additionally, theoretical considerations provide guidelines for designing probes sensitive to specific desired combinations of electric- and magnetic-field components.
A silicon-on-insulator device combining two four-wave-mixing photon-pair sources in an interferometer with a reconfigurable phase shifter is used to create and manipulate non-degenerate or degenerate, path-entangled or path-unentangled photon pairs. A quantum interference visibility of nearly 100% is observed on-chip. This device is a first step towards fully integrated quantum technologies.
Control over the luminescence lifetimes of upconversion nanocrystals allows a new form of temporal multiplexing for imaging and data-storage applications.
An optical-field-driven streak camera for the temporal characterization (with potentially attosecond resolution) of ultrashort free-electron pulses at 25 keV is demonstrated. It involves intersecting an electron beam and a laser beam at a thin metal mirror.
Little is known about triplet excitons in semiconducting single-walled nanotubes, despite their importance in various applications. The pump–probe and spin-sensitive photoluminescence of such nanotubes is studied, and the quantum yield of triplet formation, triplet lifetime and triplet exciton size are found to be 5 ± 2%, 30 ± 10 µs and 0.65 nm, respectively.
Clear evidence is presented for the origins of photocurrent generation in metallic and semiconducting carbon nanotubes — photocurrent is found to be mainly generated by photothermal and photovoltaic effects in metallic and semiconducting carbon nanotubes, respectively. This finding will enable the engineering of highly efficient carbon-based photodetectors and energy-harvesting devices.
The use of Raman spectroscopy for high-resolution optical imaging is severely limited by the inherent weakness of the Raman effect. Now, a giant resonant Raman effect is demonstrated from J-aggregated dye molecules encapsulated in single-walled carbon nanotubes, and it is used to realize multispectral Raman imaging.
Perpendicular photoswitching of the polarization plane of the output second-harmonic light is observed in a chiral spin-crossover assembly based on an iron-octacyanoniobate magnet. This photoswitching can be reversed by irradiating with blue or red light. It originates from alternate photoswitching between the crystallographic and magnetic contributions to second-harmonic generation.
Room-temperature lasing in core–shell–cap GaAs/AlGaAs/GaAs nanowires is demonstrated using optical pumping. It is realized by employing a Fabry–Pérot cavity along with material optimization and surface recombination minimization. This demonstration should prove useful for designing nanoscale optoelectronic devices operating at near-infrared wavelengths.
A continuous-variable cluster state containing more than 10,000 entangled modes is deterministically generated and fully characterized. The developed time-domain multiplexing method allows each quantum mode to be manipulated by the same optical components at different times. An efficient scheme for measurement-based quantum computation on this cluster state is presented.
An approach is demonstrated that allows the optical transmission matrix to be noninvasively measured over a large volume inside complex samples using a standard photoacoustic imaging set-up. This approach opens the way towards deep-tissue imaging and light delivery utilizing endogenous optical contrast.
The carrier-envelope phase of laser fields at metal tips can affect the generation and motion of strong-field emitted electrons. Observed variations in the width of plateau-like photoelectron spectra characteristic of the sub-cycle regime may lead to the control of coherent electron motion at metallic nanostructures on ultrashort lengths and timescales.
An easily implementable reconstruction scheme is demonstrated for determining the full vectorial amplitude and relative phase distributions of highly confined electromagnetic fields with subwavelength resolution from a single-scan measurement. This scheme will help improve microscopy and nanoscopy techniques.
A new laser-field measurement technique is demonstrated that exploits nonlinear optical mixing in a gas in which attosecond pulses are being generated. The instantaneous field of an unknown pulse is imprinted onto the deflection of an attosecond pulse using an all-optical set-up with a bandwidth of up to 1 PHz.
Two-, three- and higher multiphoton absorption processes are shown to occur in amyloid protein fibres, which are thought to play a role in various diseases, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. The nonlinear optical behaviour of such proteins may also be useful for fabricating photonics devices.
