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Topological photonics has promised new devices that are resistant to backscattering, leading to lower loss, greater nonlinearity, and smaller footprint. New research shows that in reciprocal photonic crystals, backscattering is unavoidable, implying that breaking reciprocity is essential to leveraging photonic Chern insulators.
Multiple scattering from birefringent nanospheres confers brilliant whiteness to parts of the Pacific cleaner shrimp, inspiring new ways to achieve broadband reflection with thin layers of material.
Due to dispersion, the group velocity of laser pulses propagating in plasmas slows down with increasing wavelength, which presents challenges for precision-controlled plasma interactions. Now, new techniques for spatio-temporal pulse shaping have lifted this limitation in the demonstration of short-pulse table-top soft X-ray lasers.
The Ti:Sa laser, a workhorse of any optics laboratory, is typically a bench-top system. A hybrid integration approach now enables a low-threshold photonic-circuit-integrated Ti:Sa laser the size of a fingernail.
A photothermal microscopy technique overcomes the diffraction limit by exploiting the spatiotemporal dynamics of heat dissipation within the imaging volume, offering new opportunities for super-resolution, bond-selective and label-free imaging of biological targets.
X-ray photons emitted by free electrons travelling in van der Waals materials show energy shifts induced by quantum recoil, thus offering a viable route to generating tailored and tunable single X-ray photons.
A field trial in the Swiss mountains demonstrating that an intense laser beam can guide lightning discharge over tens of metres gives hope for the development of a new form of mobile lightning protection.
A scheme for converting qubits between two different representations, discrete and continuous variables, paves the way for more-efficient quantum networks.
The near-field chirality of a single-symmetry achiral object enables polarization-dependent unidirectional photocurrent generation, and the vectorial output paves a way for a new family of geometric photodetectors.
