Volume 17 Issue 9, September 2023

Optics is now going beneath the waves to give remote-operated vehicles and divers fast optical wireless data links. Nature Photonics spoke with Boon Ooi from KAUST, a leading researcher into underwater photonics research.

A transmission electron microscopy technique enables movies of optical near-fields to be recorded with a temporal resolution faster than the oscillation of optical electric fields.

Researchers have developed efficient electro-optic tools for manipulating the time and frequency of single photons by taking inspiration from Fresnel lenses.

The introduction of a two-step deconvolution workflow maximizes the detection of fluorescence in fluctuation-based super-resolution imaging, enabling a square millimetre field of view to be captured in as little as ten minutes.

A diffractive axicon (a device that diffracts the input light pulse radially) enables complex correlations between the topological charges and the frequencies of ultrashort laser pulses, resulting in a variety of ultrashort coiled light structures.

The laser community returned to Prague to celebrate science and to be connected, in person, again, while high-power lasers were in the limelight.

The authors discuss the opportunities and challenges facing underwater photovoltaics.

Near-infrared-emitting tin-based perovskite light-emitting diodes with greatly improved efficiency are realized by the use of additives during fabrication.

To bridge the ultrafast and slow classes of quantum-information-processing systems, a Fresnel time lens is developed by using a wideband electro-optic phase modulator combined with a dispersion element. The single-photon spectral bandwidth is compressed from picosecond to nanosecond timescales.

By tuning the spatial width, the strength and the frequency of a pump beam in two-dimensional cylindrical microcavities supporting stable, robust photonic snake states, a set of broadband and perfectly synchronized two-dimensional frequency combs can be realized.

Large perovskite nanocrystals are synthesized to increase the cryogenic exciton radiative rate. At liquid helium temperatures, single photons from perovskite nanocrystals coalesce at a beam splitter, signalling the existence of indistinguishable photon emission.

Researchers design and demonstrate a scalable yet compact chip-based link architecture that may enable terabit-scale optical interconnects for hyperscale data centres.

Photonic radar is exploited for non-contact vital sign detection with a demonstration on a cane toad with a view to application in humans. Optical signals generated from the system are also explored for LiDAR-based vital sign detection, which may yield improved accuracy and system robustness.

Tailoring the composition of organic cations enables manipulating the recombination rates of perovskites. Optimized solution-processed perovskite emitters fabricated on silicon exhibit up to 42.6-MHz modulation bandwidth and 50-Mbps data rate.

Super-resolution imaging based on autocorrelation with two-step deconvolution (SACD) enables recording super-resolution images with 128-nm spatial resolution over a field of view of 2.0 mm × 1.4 mm within a 10-min acquisition time.

The intrinsic random amplitude and phase modulation of 40 distinct lines of a microresonator frequency comb operated in the modulation instability regime are used to realize massively parallel random-modulation continuous-wave light detection and ranging, without requiring any electro-optical modulator or microwave synthesizer.

Introduction of a diffractive axicon in a pulse shaper enables imparting topological–spectral correlation to ultrafast pulses over 200 nm in the visible region and with topological charges up to 80.