Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dynamic control of incoherent light sources at ultrafast timescales is tremendously challenging. Now, a technique using a spatially structured optical pump and semiconductor metasurfaces has been developed that dynamically steers sub-picosecond pulses of ultrafast incoherent emission.
