Volume 11 Issue 3, March 2017

Reabsorption losses have long been holding back the commercial viability of luminescent solar concentrators. Now, non-toxic silicon-based quantum dots with enhanced Stokes shift may enable the technology to enjoy practical implementation.

Coherent backscattering experiments indicate that spontaneous Raman scattering is a coherent process that can lead to macroscopically observable interference phenomena in disordered solid-state samples.

The mathematics of manifolds is providing inspiration for creating exotic states of light with unique properties such as robustness against disorder and unidirectional propagation.

The underlying principles and unique optical applications of structures exhibiting near-zero dielectric permittivity and/or magnetic permeability are reviewed. The timely relevance to nonlinear, non-reciprocal and non-local effects is highlighted.

A passively mode-locked laser system featuring cavity filtering and cavity-enhanced nonlinear interactions within an integrated microring resonator produces nanosecond optical pulses with a spectral width of 104.9 MHz.

Stimulated emission double depletion addresses the issue of background in super-resolution imaging and quantitative microscopy through implementation of a two-pulse sequence in a modified stimulated emission depletion set-up. The measured background intensity is removed from each voxel in the acquired images thanks to time-resolved detection.

Constructive interference is observed in the inelastically backscattered Raman radiation from nanostructured media. The effect is studied at a macroscopic scale and is explained in the context of Rayleigh–Raman random walks inside strongly scattering materials.

Reabsorption losses in luminescent solar concentrators can be avoided by the use of indirect-bandgap semiconductor nanostructures. The technology has been used to demonstrate flexible luminescent solar concentrators with performance comparable to flat concentrators.

Control of speckle fields yields high-definition 3D holographic images.

A solution-processed organic phototransistor is operated at 100-frame-per-second rates with external quantum efficiencies above 100%. Dynamic range as high as 103 dB was shown for 30-frame-per-second operation.

The application of d.c. fields across p–i–n junctions in silicon ridge waveguides leads to crystal symmetry breaking. This induces a second-order optical nonlinear susceptibility that enables phase-only modulation and second-harmonic generation with an efficiency of ∼13% W^–1 at 2.29 µm.