Volume 11 Issue 9, September 2017

The generation and manipulation of cavity solitons in microresonators is creating new opportunities for Kerr combs to aid applications such as optical communications and spectroscopy.

Room-temperature single-photon emission at several wavelengths in the near-infrared, including the telecom window, is realized by organic colour centres chemically implanted on chirality-defined single-walled carbon nanotubes.

An innovative data transmission protocol that effectively makes an optical fibre link linear in its behaviour is shown to benefit high-speed, long-distance optical communication operating at high signal powers.

Application of computational techniques, such as machine learning, is rapidly growing in the field of imaging.

The importance of the Fano resonance concept is recognized across multiple fields of physics. In this Review, Fano resonance is explored in the context of optics, with particular emphasis on dielectric nanostructures and metasurfaces.

A unidirectional photonic wire laser has been developed by integrating reflectors into terahertz quantum cascade lasers. The transverse dimension is much smaller than the lasing wavelength (80 μm). A record wall-plug power efficiency of 1% is achieved.

Counter-propagating solitons are generated in microresonator systems, producing dual-soliton frequency-comb streams with different repetition rates but high relative coherence useful for spectroscopy and laser ranging systems.

Variable micropotentials for light are created by thermo-optic imprinting of a dye–polymer solution within a microcavity. A thermalized photon Bose–Einstein condensate as well as the coupling and eigenstate hybridization of sites are demonstrated.

The Kerr nonlinearity limit for optical fibre communications is surpassed by using nonlinear multiplexing.

Single-photon emission with 99% purity is generated from sp³ defects in carbon nanotubes (CNTs) by optical excitation at room temperature. By increasing the CNT diameter from 0.76 nm to 0.94 nm, the emission wavelength can be changed from 1,100 nm to 1,600 nm.

An optical technique makes it possible to determine the distribution of gold nanoparticles in tissue.

Erbium chloride silicate nanowire promises optical gain for nanophotonic circuits.

Isolated attosecond pulses (IAPs) in the extreme-ultraviolet range are generated by the interaction of half-cycle mid-infrared pulses with gas (Xe, Kr or Ar) and solid media (quartz). The energy of the IAPs is optically tunable over an octave.

By driving a high-Q fibre-based Fabry–Pérot microresonator with periodic, picosecond optical pulses, deterministic generation of stable femtosecond dissipative cavity solitons has been experimentally realized.