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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.
The sensitivity and bandwidth of force measurements are improved by simultaneously probing the motion of two independent mechanical sensors with entangled light.
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.
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.
Progress in high-performance tandem solar cells and quantum cascade laser light sources were highlights of the Japan Society of Applied Physics Spring Meeting.
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.
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.