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Liquid suspensions of semiconductor nanocrystals that can be printed or coated onto a substrate promise a new era of low-cost optoelectronics. The demonstration of infrared image sensors and displays based on this approach and fully integrated with silicon electronics suggests that the technology is maturing rapidly.
Light beams striking a flat surface are commonly considered to reflect with perfect symmetry. But highly precise experiments in the infrared region have now confirmed that this is not truly the case in practice, and the size of the angular deviation has now been measured.
Researchers have demonstrated a reconfigurable photonic circuit on a chip that can create a four-photon entangled state. The scalability and compactness of the device opens the door towards practical quantum computation.
The ability to measure distances with high precision is of fundamental importance. Femtosecond optical frequency combs offer an intriguing solution to the problem and could prove invaluable in space satellite missions of the future.
The creation of institutes dedicated to combining photonics research and education under one roof is helping the field to thrive. The latest country to embrace the idea is Australia, with the opening of a new institute in Sydney.
The construction of a polymer solar cell that can successfully collect an electron and hole for almost every incident photon suggests that great improvements in the efficiency of organic photovoltaics should be possible.
Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have generated billions of positrons, forming the highest antimatter densities ever created on earth, by using superintense short laser pulses.
Random lasers can be made simply by grinding a laser crystal and optically pumping the resulting powder. The physics behind the resulting laser emission is rich but has led to much controversy. New experiments may now settle the debate behind their operation.
Pigmented inks in a microfluidic structure provide a new approach for fabricating bright, colourful electronic paper with a reflectivity of greater than 50%. The challenge now is to combine the scheme with fully functioning drive electronics.
By using light to assist the recording process, hard disk drive capacity could potentially be increased by two orders of magnitude. The idea is to heat the magnetic medium locally, thus temporarily lowering its resistance to magnetic polarization.
Imaging through linear media is straightforward, but light beams propagating through nonlinear media become heavily distorted, rendering all usual imaging techniques practically useless. Now, scientists have found a way to recover images transmitted through nonlinear media — by using back-propagation simulations.
Ultrafast all-optical computation with silicon photonic devices is still a dream. New research, which combines organic nonlinear polymers with silicon waveguides, is now bringing that dream closer to reality.
The ability to harness the Faraday effect on a short timescale in an ensemble of hot atoms may prove useful as a read-out tool for quantum information based on microscale vapour cells.
