Volume 1 Issue 4, April 2007

Many people believe that the LED was discovered by US researchers working in the 1960s. In fact, Henry Round at Marconi Labs noted the emission of light from a semiconductor diode 100 years ago and, independently, a forgotten Russian genius — Oleg Losev — discovered the LED.

Arguably the most important element for the electronics industry, silicon is now being given a new lease of life in the world of photonics.

Holographic disk drives have long promised to eclipse even the latest high-density optical storage media. Now finally, as Duncan Graham-Rowe reports, the promising three-dimensional approach to storing information is about to make its debut.

Walk into a photonics lab anywhere in the world and it is almost a certainty that some type of optical power meter will be close at hand. Nature Photonics profiles a selection of the latest products to hit the market.

Cloaking devices for visible light come a step closer to reality by combining the modern form of a Roman technology with ideas from ancient Greece.

Changing the polarization of tightly focused light could be important for future high-resolution imaging and data-storage applications. Researchers have now shown that a simple lens can do the task without the need for polarizers.

The optics field is booming, as reflected by the impressive turn out at Photonics West this year. The conference brought researchers and industry figures together to forge the latest light paths, and microelectromechanical systems technology featured strongly.

Capturing images with a digital camera that has just a single pixel may sound implausible, but that's exactly what US researchers have achieved. Such devices may soon offer a memory-efficient alternative to conventional megapixel digital cameras.

People have been trying to get silicon to lase since the first semiconductor laser in the 1960s. Thanks to recent breakthroughs, silicon lasers are finally beginning to take flight. Amber Jenkins spoke to Haisheng Rong, Victor Krutul and Manny Vara at Intel to find out more.