Reviews & Analysis

The spatiotemporal characterization of a high-peak-power pulsed laser beam reveals previously undetected wavefront distortions.

The challenges of applying super-resolution imaging to live cells and providing meaningful information about real problems in biology were discussed in detail at ICON Europe in Basel.

The discovery that Raman scattering, with a little help from excitons, may be exploited to induce cooling of a solid-state material bodes well for new forms of optical refrigeration.

Combining a photochromic molecule with a semiconducting polymer yields an organic non-volatile, multilevel memory with a current output that can be switched and controlled by light.

Tight focusing of two light beams onto an organic molecule opens the way to coherent nonlinear interactions at the few-photon level.

Engineering optical and acoustic modes in membrane silicon waveguides has now been used to demonstrate record high net Brillouin amplification in silicon. This technique enables new possible applications including silicon on-chip Brillouin amplification, Brillouin lasers, and Brillouin devices for signal processing.

Evidence of strongly enhanced coupling of light with nuclei offers the potential to extend applied quantum optics to the hard X-ray regime.

The demonstration of a prototype avalanche photodiode with a staircase band profile suggests that such devices may ultimately become a viable alternative to photomultiplier tubes in the infrared.

Mechanical oscillation in a microtoroidal optical cavity transfers chaos from a pump to a probe laser beam with a different wavelength. Through stochastic resonance, the combination of noise and internal chaotic dynamics leads to amplification of optomechanically induced light self-oscillations.

The sustainability of many existing desalination technologies is questionable. Plasmon-mediated solar desalination has now been demonstrated for the first time, using an aluminium structure that absorbs photons spanning the 200 nm to 2,500 nm wavelength range, and is both cheap and 'clean'.

By making use of the spin angular momentum of light, rotational frequency shifts of harmonic waves generated by spinning nonlinear media have been observed.

At the 63rd Spring Meeting of the Japan Society of Applied Physics, scientists described how femtosecond laser pulses can be used to perform tasks such as quantum beat spectroscopy, control of magnetization, cell sorting and crystal growth.

A double-slit experiment performed with two rubidium atoms precisely held in an optical lattice inside an optical cavity provides a new platform for exploring quantum effects.

Optical forces are increasingly relevant in nanoscale optical science and engineering, but optical momentum in materials is still not fully understood. It is now shown that microstructure details as well as macroscopic optical parameters are important in determining optical momentum.

Single crystals of perovskites are currently of interest to help fathom fundamental physical parameters limiting the performance of perovskite-based polycrystalline solar cells. Now, such perovskites offer a technology platform for optoelectronic devices, such as cheap and sensitive X-ray detectors.

A cavity design that makes it possible to directly generate Laguerre–Gaussian modes on demand looks set to benefit applications in microscopy and data communications.