Volume 8 Issue 12, December 2014

Nature Photonics spoke to Pierre Berini — pioneer of plasmon waveguides — to get some perspective on how nanophotonics has evolved over the past decade and where it is heading.

A network of optical parametric oscillators has been harnessed to find solutions to a complex problem in statistical physics that is difficult to solve using numerical computing algorithms.

The development of practical blue LEDs required great perseverance by several Japanese scientists who had to learn how to fabricate high-quality films of GaN and effectively dope them to create light-emitting p–n junctions.

The award of this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry to the pioneers of various optical schemes capable of achieving super-resolution and single-molecule detection is recognition of a revolution in optical imaging.

Metamaterials enable the tailoring of properties like dielectric permittivity and magnetic permeability. Electromagnetic excitations of metamaterial constituents and their interactions are reviewed, as well as promising future directions.

The optical properties of graphene and emerging two-dimensional materials including transition metal dichalcogenides are reviewed with an emphasis on nanophotonic applications.

The latest developments in laser miniaturization, including those based on metals and dielectrics, are reviewed and future challenges outlined.

Recent developments in probe-based near-field microscopy are reviewed, including techniques for determining the phase, amplitude and separate components of the electric and magnetic field.

The first table-top hard X-ray plasma source driven by a mid-infrared source provides 10^9 photons per pulse.

Combining the principles of time reversal and adaptive control with a spatial light modulator makes it possible to focus light onto moving objects hidden within a scattering medium. The approach could prove useful for medical applications.

A network of four degenerate optical parametric oscillators (OPOs) is employed to find the ground state of the Ising Hamiltonian. The good performance of the network reveals the potential of OPOs for many similar problems.

70,000 diffraction patterns captured over twelve minutes at the Linac Coherent Light Source yield reconstructions of the smallest single biological objects imaged with an X-ray laser.

Using a spectroscopy streaking technique at LCLS (Linac Coherent Light Source), researchers demonstrate temporal characterization of X-ray pulses with sub-femtosecond resolution.

The conjectured entropy-power inequality, which determines the lower bound of channel capacity, is mathematically proved even in the quantum regime.

A nonlinear π phase shift is induced by the interaction between a ⁸⁵Rb atom and a fibre-coupled bottle resonator.

Arno Rauschenbeutel explains to Nature Photonics how atoms help induce a nonlinear π phase shift at the single photon level.

The creation of photonic materials, circuitry, devices and probes that act on the nanoscale is yielding new opportunities for controlling light in the sub-wavelength regime. The result could be higher density information storage and processing, and improved sensing and imaging capabilities.