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Organic photovoltaics offer the tantalizing promise of low-cost plastic coatings that can be applied to building surfaces and roofing to generate electricity sustainably. Now, the demonstration that the addition of organic dyes can improve device performance by energy-transfer processes offers an exciting new opportunity.
Enhancing magneto-optic effects may help to reduce the size of photonic devices. Recent research by several groups shows that the features of metal optical components can be exploited to enhance typically weak magneto-optic effects.
Nanophotonics is of both fundamental and applied importance. This field has a wide range of applications, including light-emitting devices and optical integrated circuits.
Using a pump–probe technique, scientists have experimentally demonstrated a nonlinear imaging scheme that permits the super-resolution imaging of nonfluorescent samples, making it promising for use with unstained specimens.
Cooling materials using interaction with light has come a long way in the past 20 years. Researchers at the recent 2013 Photonics West showed that they can cool new types of materials and more can be expected in the future using new approaches.
The damping of surface plasmons hinders the realization of nanophotonic devices. Researchers have now uncovered some of the mid-infrared damping mechanisms for plasmons in graphene, which offer a number of unique and interesting properties.
Using photons to disseminate encryption codes with complete security is one of the great successes of quantum information science. It has now been shown that long-distance cryptographic communication is just as effective when the scheme involves measuring the wave properties of light, rather than its particle properties.
A convenient optical scheme for compressing the bandwidth and tuning the frequency of single photons could allow photon qubits to be used in matter-based quantum memories. This development is also an important step towards arbitrary waveform generation of quantum states of light.
Experiments with a quantum simulator made from an integrated optical circuit reveal that bosons and fermions react to disorder in different ways, experiencing different strengths of Anderson localization.
The combination of ultrasound and optics, together with statistics, now permits light focusing and imaging deep inside strongly scattering media at the optical diffraction limit.
Despite great efforts to develop silicon-based optoelectronic devices, efficient photon emission from silicon still remains an elusive goal. Nanocavities could offer a path towards efficient silicon light emitters through strong optical confinement.
The isolated symmetry points of photonic graphene are unstable in three dimensions. Researchers have now proposed topologically robust points by using minimal surfaces and employing symmetry-breaking ideas from quantum field theory.
