Reviews & Analysis

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  • Two papers in Science demonstrate tracking of the stepping motion of the kinesin motor protein with nanometric spatial precision and sub-millisecond temporal resolution by using MINFLUX, a highly photon-efficient single-molecule localization technique.

    • Fernando D. Stefani
    News & Views
  • The sensitivity and bandwidth of force measurements are improved by simultaneously probing the motion of two independent mechanical sensors with entangled light.

    • Giovanni Di Giuseppe
    • David Vitali
    News & Views
  • The interaction of atoms with intense squeezed light is affected by the quantum noise of the driving field whereby the quantum noise of the squeezed driving field is imprinted in the emitted high harmonics.

    • Paraskevas Tzallas
    News & Views
  • Optical analogues of electronic memristors are desirable for applications including photonic artificial intelligence and computing platforms. Here, recent progress on integrated optical memristors is reviewed.

    • Nathan Youngblood
    • Carlos A. Ríos Ocampo
    • Harish Bhaskaran
    Review Article
  • Progress in high-performance tandem solar cells and quantum cascade laser light sources were highlights of the Japan Society of Applied Physics Spring Meeting.

    • Noriaki Horiuchi
    Meeting Report
  • The study of a light‒matter fluid of exciton–polaritons confirms the role of an inverse energy cascade in two-dimensional quantum turbulence.

    • Fabrice P. Laussy
    News & Views
  • Exceptionally high secret key generation rates of 64 Mbits–1 and 115.8 Mbits–1 over a 10 km optical fibre link have been achieved, thanks to custom-built 14-pixel and 16-pixel superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors, respectively, and the use of fast quantum key distribution transmitters.

    • Davide Bacco
    • Maja Colautti
    News & Views
  • 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.

    • Mikael C. Rechtsman
    News & Views
  • 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.

    • Diederik S. Wiersma
    News & Views
  • 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.

    • Sam K. Barber
    News & Views
  • 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.

    • Arnan Mitchell
    • Heike Ebendorff-Heidepriem
    News & Views
  • 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.

    • Zhilun Zhao
    • Wei Min
    News & Views
  • 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.

    • Nahid Talebi
    News & Views
  • 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.

    • Cord L. Arnold
    • Clara J. Saraceno
    • M. Teresa Correia de Barros
    News & Views