Volume 1 Issue 6, June 2007

Researchers are increasingly toying with the idea of taking their ideas out of universities and into the marketplace. Starting your own company can be extremely rewarding, but it requires perseverance and a great deal of hard work.

Nanophotonics has emerged as an exciting new arena concerned with the interaction of light with nanostructured materials. But if nanophotonics is to maximize its impact on the market and the next generation of technology, those within the field will need to form a cohesive plan.

A growing number of enterprises around the world are now commercializing fibre Bragg grating sensors for sensing everything from temperature and pressure to vibration and strain. Duncan Graham-Rowe reports.

Photonics research in Japan is thriving and there is no better place to hear the latest news firsthand than the meetings of the Japan Society of Applied Physics. Nature Photonics decided to pay the 54th Spring Meeting a visit.

The combination of superconducting single-photon detectors and phase-shift keying technology has enabled a leap in the performance of quantum cryptography.

The demonstration of a fingertip-sized optical vapour cell on a silicon chip could ultimately lead to compact devices capable of performing sophisticated optical-signal-processing tasks using only a few photons.

Charge-coupled-device cameras are a vital component of many applications involving digital imaging. Neil Savage presents a summary of some of the latest products.

Free-electron lasers offer an alternative approach to creating short pulses of high-intensity light. Nature Photonics spoke to Mikhail Yurkov about pushing the wavelength of these machines towards the X-ray range.