Volume 13 Issue 11, November 2019

While the ability to increase the light–matter interaction by depositing graphene inside the air holes of a long length of photonic crystal fibre is worth celebrating, cautious optimism is called for when we begin to discuss the industrialization of graphene-based fibre-optic components.

A wide-field system that can perform video-rate imaging of the entire area of the brain of an awake mouse is aiding the study of neurones, epilepsy and the immune system.

A quantum-dot-based single-photon source with a polarized single-photon efficiency of 60% and an indistinguishability of 0.975 is demonstrated by introducing a small asymmetry in a photonic cavity structure.

Front-induced transitions have been used in dispersion-engineered waveguides for frequency conversion, optical delays, and bandwidth and pulse duration manipulation. This Review provides a theoretical description of the subject and highlights the potential for light manipulation in guided optics.

A hybrid material based on uniform graphene on both the outer surface and inner hole walls of a photonic crystal fibre offers a strong, tunable light–matter interaction and good broadband electro-optic modulation performance under low gate voltage.

Blue light-emitting diodes based on perovskite nanostructures embedded within quasi-two-dimensional phases show highly effective charge injection and suppressed non-radiative recombination.

Long-lived, efficient organic light-emitting diodes based on a simple design of a single layer of an active light-emitting medium sandwiched between two contacts and no additional charge injection and transport layers are reported.

Single-photon sources with a single-photon efficiency of 0.60, a single-photon purity of 0.975 and an indistinguishability of 0.975 are demonstrated. This is achieved by fabricating elliptical resonators around site-registered quantum dots.

A thermodynamical framework for multimode nonlinear optical systems is presented. The new understanding may lead to next-generation high-power multimode optical structures.

Lasers based on Landau levels, which should offer wide wavelength tunability, including across the elusive THz range, are a step closer to reality with a demonstration showing how to suppress the main loss mechanism.

A phase-control technique based on the use of fast one-dimensional (1D) spatial light modulators and a 1D-to-2D transformation enables high-speed wavefront measurements and manipulation in complex media, facilitating real-time applications such as imaging in live tissue.

By synthesizing undistorted cross-sectional image reconstructions from multiple conventional images acquired with angular diversity, optical coherence refraction tomography offers greater than threefold improvement in lateral resolution and speckle reduction in imaging tissue ultrastructure, and reconstructs the tissue’s internal refractive index distribution.

Following excitation with a resonant laser, on-demand generation of non-classical light states in photon-number superpositions of zero-, one- and two-photon Fock states is demonstrated from a GaAs-based cavity containing InAs quantum dots.

Video-rate imaging of the brains of awake mice with a field of view of 10 × 12 mm² and a spatial resolution of 1.2 µm is accomplished.