Reviews & Analysis

Filter By:

  • The free-carrier dispersion effect with photo-excited free carriers provides all-optical control of the resonance of photonic crystal microcavities. Using this technique, a spatial light modulator comprising optically addressed cavity arrays has been developed for high-efficiency, high-bandwidth spatiotemporal modulation of light.

    • Volkan Gurses
    News & Views
  • Experimental confirmation that the Gouy phase can modify the photonic de Broglie wavelength opens up many exciting directions in metrology using quantum systems with higher-order Gaussian modes.

    • Xuemei Gu
    • Mario Krenn
    News & Views
  • Suppression of exciton–vibration coupling yields organic light-emitting diodes that emit at 1,000 nm in the NIR-II spectral region, which is important for biological imaging.

    • Alessandro Minotto
    News & Views
  • Ultrasound-induced gas bubbles in tissue can temporarily minimize optical scattering, enabling laser light to be focused at greater depth for higher-resolution imaging.

    • Paul Beard
    • Kishan Dholakia
    News & Views
  • Several research groups have now succeeded in achieving lasing in free-electron lasers (FELs) driven by compact plasma wakefield accelerators. In the future, the approach may ultimately lead to a new breed of much smaller, more affordable FELs.

    • Oliver Graydon
    Meeting Report
  • The use of on-chip nonlinear waveguides that can convert 1.5-ÎĽm wavelength signals into the 2-ÎĽm region brings new opportunities for expanding the bandwidth of optical communications.

    • Fatima Gunning
    • Brian Corbett
    News & Views
  • The energy exchange between two Rydberg atoms is induced and observed on a nanosecond timescale, paving the way for ultrafast quantum gates.

    • Peng Xu
    • Ming-Sheng Zhan
    News & Views
  • The demonstration that diamond nitrogen–vacancy centre technology can optically detect voltages with an impressive sensitivity could bring new opportunities for investigating neurobiology.

    • Milos Nesladek
    • Micha E. Spira
    News & Views
  • A combination of state-of-the-art temporal and spatial shaping techniques enables shaping pulsed laser light in all dimensions in a correlated manner, paving the way for new classes of on-demand space–time wavepackets.

    • Pierre BĂ©jot
    • Bertrand Kibler
    News & Views
  • A photonic quantum heat engine based on superradiance — many-atom quantum coherence — is shown to deliver enhanced operation, with an efficiency no longer bounded by the Carnot limit.

    • Moochan Kim
    • Marlan Scully
    • Anatoly Svidzinsky
    News & Views
  • Multilayered ferroelectric NbOI2 crystals with sub-100-nm thickness exhibit efficient second harmonic generation, paving the way for on-chip nonlinear optical components.

    • Rupert F. Oulton
    • Jefferson FlĂłrez
    • Alex S. Clark
    News & Views
  • A new method enables precise control of spin qubits in diamond by selectively activating them with a laser beam, thus paving the way to the control of spin qubits in dense arrays for applications in quantum technology.

    • Tim Hugo Taminiau
    News & Views
  • The hardest barrier in the way to topological control over light with magnetic fields is extremely weak magneto-optic coupling. Now, strong light-matter coupling in an optical cavity has been used to reach record energy splitting values for photonic spins in magnetic fields. This is a potential game changer for topological photonics.

    • Anton Nalitov
    News & Views