Volume 11 Issue 8, August 2017

Spin–valley coupling in transition metal dichalcogenides has been shown to persist at room temperature when excitons are coherently coupled to cavity photons.

The realization of satellite-to-ground quantum cryptography would make quantum-secured communications possible on a global scale. Four recent breakthroughs suggest that this compelling capability could be achieved by the end of this decade.

Significant improvements in the loss and drive voltage of silicon photonics-based optical phase modulators look set to benefit both short-reach and long-distance data communications.

Ultrathin, versatile, integrated optical devices and high-speed optical information processing could be the upcoming real-world opportunities of plasmonic metasurfaces.

Materials whose optical properties can be reconfigured are crucial for photonic applications such as optical memories. Phase-change materials offer such utility and here recent progress is reviewed.

An evanescent single-molecule biosensor that operates at the fundamental precision limit, allowing a four-order-of-magnitude reduction in optical intensity while maintaining state-of-the-art sensitivity, is demonstrated.

Hybrid silicon optical modulator brings efficiency benefits.

Hybrid InGaAsP/Si optical modulator gives silicon photonics an efficient scheme for phase modulation.

Valley-polarized light–matter quasiparticles in two-dimensional semiconductor microcavities are demonstrated. Access to spin–valley physics may be useful for photonic quantum technologies.

Researchers excite valley-addressable polaritons in MoSe₂ incorporated in a photonic microcavity. Understanding of the valley pseudospin retention is revealed and robust states demonstrated.

The feasibility of satellite-to-ground quantum communication is demonstrated by using a microsatellite in low-Earth orbit. The quantum states are discriminated by a ground receiver with four photon-counters with a quantum bit error rate below 5%.

The feasibility of satellite-assisted quantum communication is demonstrated by a field test on the ground. To supress noise due to sunlight the wavelength of 1,550 nm is chosen, and spectrum and spatial filtering technology developed.

More than 500 near-infrared laser photons are scattered by a single electron into a single X-ray photon. This is the first experimental evidence of high-order multiphoton Thomson scattering and validates the decades-old theoretical predictions.

The efficiency and indistinguishability of single-photon emission by a quantum dot optically coupled to a microcavity and to a waveguide are theoretically investigated. Owing to unavoidable phonon sideband, they can never reach 100% simultaneously.