Reviews & Analysis

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  • 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
  • A large-angle twist between two bilayer graphene films makes a sensitive and broadband infrared–terahertz detector as a result of interlayer screening and a crystal field-induced bandgap.

    • Bingchen Deng
    • Fengnian Xia
    News & Views
  • This Review covers a comparison between various label-free biomedical imaging techniques, their advantages over label-based methods and relevant applications.

    • Natan T. Shaked
    • Stephen A. Boppart
    • Jürgen Popp
    Review Article
  • A scheme for fast, comprehensive characterization of high-dimensional quantum states could aid quantum applications in imaging and information processing.

    • Gregory Kanter
    • Prem Kumar
    News & Views
  • Combining photoacoustic excitation with optomechanics enables the mechanical modes associated with entire microorganisms to be detected, demonstrating that mechanical spectroscopy allows us to identify microorganisms and characterize their life stages.

    • Eduardo Gil-Santos
    News & Views
  • New conductive and perovskite inks enable hand-drawing of optoelectronic devices with a ballpoint pen on a variety of daily substrates, including paper, textiles and other irregular surfaces.

    • Faheem Ershad
    • Wenjing Song
    • Cunjiang Yu
    News & Views
  • Photonics enables the design of ultrafast, energy-efficient computing approaches for artificial intelligence, and key to the scalability of such approaches is photonics integration.

    • Rachel Won
    Meeting Report
  • Since the inception of the idea of temporal solitons in optical fibres, published in 1973, the concept of optical solitons has revolutionized the fundamental science of optics and photonics technologies. This Perspective gives an outlook on the future of solitons in ultrafast lasers, frequency combs, biomedical applications, telecommunications and signal processing, as well as the emerging new science of solitons.

    • Andrea Blanco-Redondo
    • C. Martijn de Sterke
    • Sergei K. Turitsyn
    Perspective
  • Event-based detectors, which respond to local changes in light intensity rather than producing images, enable super-resolution single-molecule localization microscopy with sensitivity and resolution comparable to conventional methods.

    • Ian M. Dobbie
    News & Views