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In recent years, significant progress has been made towards putting information theory on the footing of quantum mechanics. Researchers have now shown how optical fibres with zero quantum capacity can be super-activated to allow for perfect quantum communication.
A main attraction of laser-driven electron accelerators is their absence of cavity walls, which can break down in the presence of intense electric fields. Now it seems that the inclusion of a hollow glass fibre cavity could lead to more efficient acceleration at lower laser intensities.
Researchers have demonstrated that selectively exciting ensembles of laser modes using an innovative pumping scheme can tune the emission lines of a random laser from weakly interacting to strongly correlated, thus paving the way towards the realization of mode-locked random lasers.
Surface acoustic waves can actively modulate the optical mode of a photonic crystal defect cavity. Fast tuning rates, compared with the typical lifetimes of optical emitters and photons inside the cavity, pave the way for deeper insights into cavity quantum electrodynamics.
Are blue and green vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers operating at room temperature just around the corner? New gallium-nitride-based vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers are helping to overcome the intrinsic problem of low conductivities of p layers.
Going beyond the conventional approach based on the Faraday effect, scientists have now used acoustic modes optically excited in the core of a photonic crystal fibre to realize a reconfigurable all-optical isolator.
Scientists have theoretically proposed that it is possible to pull objects from a far distance towards a light source in the absence of axial optical gradient forces.
Plasmonics has great potential for enabling energy-efficient, highly integrated optical interconnects. Reducing loss and realizing CMOS-compatible active plasmonic devices are two of the main topics on the current agenda.
Although two-photon absorption in a semiconductor is typically a very weak effect, the rate of absorption increases dramatically when the two photons have very dissimilar wavelengths, enabling applications such as ultrafast optical sampling and room-temperature mid-infrared detection.
A superlattice comprising alternating layers of negative-refractive-index photonic crystals and positive-refractive-index dielectric media has been shown to exhibit an effective refractive index of zero. Experiments show that light passing through such a material experiences no phase shift.
The interaction between atoms in a Bose–Einstein condensate and plasmon-enhanced fields is a step towards the goal of realizing hybrid atom–polariton systems for tasks in quantum information processing.
Improvements in fibre, crystal and semiconductor technologies are helping to address the need for powerful and convenient light sources in the mid-infrared.
The controlled 'catch and release' of individual quantum-information-carrying photons is an important ingredient for achieving scalable quantum networking. Recently, researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics succeeded in this task in two separate systems.
Photonic quasicrystals are specially designed aperiodic materials that possess long-range order and are capable of transmitting light. Contrary to intuition, introducing disorder can be used to enhance the propagation of light through such labyrinth structures.
Wavelength-tunable ultraviolet light sources are required for a wide range of applications, but are typically difficult to manufacture and operate. A simple gas-filled optical fibre that performs efficient frequency conversion from the infrared to the deep-ultraviolet could be a promising answer.
