Reviews & Analysis

The demonstration of a low-loss diamond mirror cavity that can temporally store X-ray pulses brings hope for a future generation of X-ray free electron lasers.

Platforms enabling control over strong light–matter interactions in optical cavities provide a challenging but promising way to manipulate emergent light–matter hybrids. Spin selectivity of transitions has now been demonstrated in a two-dimensional hole gas microcavity system, paving the way towards the study of new spin physics phenomena in hybrid excitations.

Vibrations of individual molecules are difficult to detect due to thermal noise. In a recent report, researchers overcome this challenge, upconverting mid-infrared photons into visible light using nanophotonic cavities. The result is high-efficiency optical readout for single-molecule vibrational spectroscopy.

The interaction of terahertz waves with novel materials is bringing rich physics and new opportunities for applications.

Precise measurements of the length of an Earth day are essential for understanding global mass transport phenomena. A ring laser gyroscope provides absolute measurements of variations in the length of the day with a resolution of 5 parts per billion over a 14-day period.

The laser community returned to Prague to celebrate science and to be connected, in person, again, while high-power lasers were in the limelight.

A diffractive axicon (a device that diffracts the input light pulse radially) enables complex correlations between the topological charges and the frequencies of ultrashort laser pulses, resulting in a variety of ultrashort coiled light structures.

Researchers have developed efficient electro-optic tools for manipulating the time and frequency of single photons by taking inspiration from Fresnel lenses.

The introduction of a two-step deconvolution workflow maximizes the detection of fluorescence in fluctuation-based super-resolution imaging, enabling a square millimetre field of view to be captured in as little as ten minutes.

The authors discuss the opportunities and challenges facing underwater photovoltaics.

A transmission electron microscopy technique enables movies of optical near-fields to be recorded with a temporal resolution faster than the oscillation of optical electric fields.

A nonlinear optical crystal permits harmonic generation of coherent radiation deep into the ultraviolet, reaching below 200 nm.

Contrary to intuition, photons do not have to be indistinguishable for maximum photon bunching to occur. Partially indistinguishable photons can exhibit pronounced bunching.

A lithography-free photonic processor through dynamic control of optical gain distributions is demonstrated, allowing reconfigurable photonic neural networks and more efficient signal processing, and showing great promise in easing data traffic as well as accelerating information processing speeds.

Developing cost-efficient, reusable, sensitive, in situ online detection systems for radioactive gases remains challenging. Now researchers show that scintillating metal–organic frameworks can provide a high-performance detector solution.

The performance of infrared photodiodes designed with narrow-bandgap semiconductors is limited by inherent noise and the need for a low-temperature operation to mitigate it, while they also face a speed–efficiency trade-off.