Reviews & Analysis

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  • The frequency of coherent terahertz waves radiated from a single superconducting emitter can be electronically modulated on a chip with up to 40 GHz bandwidth, paving the way for high-data-rate and ultrafast terahertz wireless communications.

    • Kaveh Delfanazari
    News & Views
  • Brillouin light scattering anisotropy microscopy affords single-shot collection of angle-resolved phonon dispersion, enabling the mapping of mechanical anisotropies in living matter with a frequency resolution of 10 MHz and a spatial resolution of 2 µm.

    • Yogeshwari S. Ambekar
    • Giuliano Scarcelli
    News & Views
  • A photonic equivalent to disclination in crystals has been used to produce orbital angular momentum laser light directly on-chip, ushering in compact and efficient twisted-light lasers.

    • Andrew Forbes
    News & Views
  • Metasurfaces bring miniaturization and new avenues for the generation, manipulation and measurement of quantum light.

    • David Pile
    Meeting Report
  • Electrical excitation of a perovskite light-emitting diode is shown to contribute to optical gain, a milestone on the path towards a non-epitaxial laser diode.

    • Barry P. Rand
    • Noel C. Giebink
    News & Views
  • The fast response and efficiency of plastic scintillators are severely degraded by the preferential population of slow triplet excited states in luminescence centres, such as in dye molecules. This issue can be solved by hot exciton manipulation, which avoids population of the lowest triplet state.

    • Martin Nikl
    News & Views
  • Nonlinear optical resonators allow the coherent conversion of photons, yet fabrication tolerances limit their wavelength accuracy. Introducing periodic modulation in ring resonators is shown to allow robust and predictable selection of the converted photons.

    • Alfredo De Rossi
    • Sylvain Combrié
    News & Views
  • Acoustic modulation of atmospheric air enables the deflection of laser pulses with a peak power of 20 gigawatts, expanding the acousto-optics toolbox to high-power laser manipulation in ambient air.

    • Günter Steinmeyer
    News & Views
  • With many exotic electromagnetic effects, metamaterials are now being exploited in real-world biomedical applications, with expected impacts in healthcare.

    • Rachel Won
    Meeting Report
  • One-way light transmission can be realized by embracing, rather than mitigating, thermal effects in carefully engineered metasurfaces.

    • Said Rahimzadeh-Kalaleh Rodriguez
    • Sander A. Mann
    News & Views
  • Advances in the understanding of optical skyrmions, within a unified topological framework, are reviewed. The field structure of such optical quasiparticles, and their topological characteristics, may be useful for fields ranging from imaging to quantum technologies.

    • Yijie Shen
    • Qiang Zhang
    • Anatoly V. Zayats
    Review Article
  • The progress made in developing light-emitting technologies that are wearable, attachable or implantable is reviewed and potential applications and challenges are discussed.

    • Zhitao Zhang
    • Yue Wang
    • Chunhai Fan
    Review Article
  • A coherent microwave-to-optical conversion scheme, previously feasible only under cryogenic environments, has now been expanded to ambient conditions by using Rydberg atoms.

    • Kai-Yu Liao
    • Hui Yan
    • Shi-Liang Zhu
    News & Views
  • Modelling shows how plasma density gradients can be tailored to compress optical pulses in the final stages of laser systems towards exawatt (1018 W) peak powers.

    • Brendan Dromey
    News & Views