Volume 16 Issue 10, October 2022

A combination of state-of-the-art temporal and spatial shaping techniques enables shaping pulsed laser light in all dimensions in a correlated manner, paving the way for new classes of on-demand space–time wavepackets.

The energy exchange between two Rydberg atoms is induced and observed on a nanosecond timescale, paving the way for ultrafast quantum gates.

The demonstration that diamond nitrogen–vacancy centre technology can optically detect voltages with an impressive sensitivity could bring new opportunities for investigating neurobiology.

A double-ring-resonator device on thin-film lithium niobate enables the generation of electro-optic frequency combs with a 30% power efficiency and an optical span of 132 nm.

Ultrafast wavepackets are generated featuring precise correlations between spatial and temporal properties.

An ultrabroadband femtosecond enhancement cavity is developed, using gold-coated mirrors and a wedged-diamond-plate input coupler. Simultaneous enhancement of a 22–40 THz offset-free frequency comb allows cavity-enhanced time-domain spectroscopy of gas mixtures based on electro-optic sampling in the mid-infrared range.

Researchers demonstrate efficient frequency conversion with rhombohedral MoS₂. A second-harmonic-generation coherence length of ~530 nm at 1,520 nm wavelength and giant nonlinear optical enhancement in waveguide geometries are reported.

A superradiant photonic engine is developed by using a ¹³⁸Ba atomic beam and a high-finesse optical cavity. The mirrors of a Fabry–Pérot cavity act as the piston of an engine. The achieved engine temperature and efficiency are 1.5 × 10⁵ K and 98%, respectively.

Lanthanide nanotransducers are developed to detect broadband incoherent mid-infrared radiation in the 4–11 μm spectral window by ratiometric luminescence measurements.

Researchers demonstrated a gate-tunable graphene photodetector with a bandwidth of up to 220 GHz. This was achieved by suppressing the ‘RC’ time constant using a resistive zinc oxide top gate.

An array of ⁸⁷Rb atoms with inter-atomic distances of 1.5 μm is prepared by holographic optical tweezers. When a pair of nearby ⁸⁷Rb atoms is optically excited to a Rydberg state, the energy exchange between the atoms is observed on a timescale of nanoseconds.

Nitrogen-vacancy centres in surface-engineered diamond are demonstrated to operate as charge-sensitive fluorescent reporters, enabling an optical scheme for voltage recording in physical and biological systems.

Under near-infrared-light excitation, anti-Stokes-shift superfluorescence is observed near 590 nm at room temperature in a medium of lanthanide-doped upconversion nanoparticles. The spectral width and radiative decay lifetime are 2 nm and 46 ns, respectively, in the single-nanoparticle case.