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The introduction of two-dimensional spatial gain and loss into a photonic crystal laser leads to high-peak-power and short-pulse operation with a narrow beam divergence.
Laser-like radiation with a very large spectral coverage is obtained with a comb-like spectrum by concatenating nonlinear processes. Such a light source is extremely useful for detecting molecular trace gases.
More atoms can not only absorb more light but, if prepared in a particular quantum state, can also do so faster than single atoms. Now, researchers have experimentally demonstrated this time-reversed process of superradiance.
Recent effort in controlling the structure of light in all its degrees of freedom and dimensions has pushed the limits of structured light and broadened its potential beyond orbital angular momentum, two-dimensional fields, qubits and biphotons, and linear optical manipulation.
Through a dense krypton gas jet in the presence of a broadband near-infrared pulse, spectral compression of broadband XUV radiation between 145 and 130 nm wavelengths into a narrow-bandwidth XUV pulse at 100.3 nm wavelength by four-wave mixing is demonstrated.
The use of a non-unitary metasurface enables a new degree of freedom, allowing for dynamical and continuous control over the output quantum state and the effective quantum interaction of two single photons at will.
The counterpart of superradiance, called superabsorption, has now been observed. Superabsorption rates are much higher than that of ordinary absorption and may enable weak-signal exploitation.
Using a gas-filled anti-resonant-reflection photonic-crystal fibre, a high-brightness table-top source of coherent carrier-envelope-phase-stable waveforms is demonstrated across seven octaves (340 nm to 40,000 nm) with ultraviolet peak powers up to 2.5 MW and terahertz peak powers of 1.8 MW, without the need for changing nonlinear crystals.
Ultralow-noise erbium:fibre comb technology allows the generation of a comb spanning six octaves, from the ultraviolet (350 nm) to the mid-infrared (22,500 nm), with a resolving power of 1010 across 0.86 PHz of bandwidth.
Using a metasurface that allows shaping of the polarization state of a light beam independently at each point of space along its propagation direction, longitudinally variable polarization optical components are demonstrated, inspiring new directions in structured light, polarization-switchable devices and light–matter interaction.
Adapting the amplitude-modulated light detection and ranging approach to super-resolution microscopy offers a typical axial localization precision of 6.8 nm over the entire field of view and the axial capture range, enabling imaging of biological samples by up to several micrometres in depth.
When a laser is tuned across a split energy level, photonic diatomic molecules in two linearly coupled microresonators support the formation of self-enforcing solitary waves, featuring coherent, tunable and reproducible microcombs with up to ten times higher net conversion efficiency than the state of the art.
By using engineered gain and loss sections in a photonic crystal laser, pulses with a peak power of ~20 W and pulse width of ~35 ps have been experimentally demonstrated and even higher peak power operation (>300 W) has been theoretically predicted.