Applied optics articles within Nature Communications

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  • Review Article
    | Open Access

    The lack of a standardized approach for the characterization of the performance of 2D photodetectors represents an important obstacle towards their industrialization. Here, the authors propose practical guidelines to characterize their figures of merit and analyse common situations where their performance can be misestimated.

    • Fang Wang
    • , Tao Zhang
    •  & Weida Hu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors develop an imaging-based intelligent spectrometer on a plasmonic “rainbow” chip. It can accurately and precisely determine the spectroscopic and polarimetric information of the illumination spectrum using a single image assisted by suitably trained deep learning algorithms.

    • Dylan Tua
    • , Ruiying Liu
    •  & Qiaoqiang Gan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The resolution of orbital angular momentum holography is limited by a fundamental sampling criterion. Here, the authors break the resolution barrier by temporal multiplexing of binary holograms and enhance the resolution and capacity by several times.

    • Zijian Shi
    • , Zhensong Wan
    •  & Xing Fu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Authors present a fibre Bragg grating-based all-pass spectral phase filter with an unprecedented frequency resolution of 1 GHz, at least 10× improvement compared to a standard optical waveshaper. Using the all-fibre phase filter, fully passive NOT and XNOR logic operations are experimentally demonstrated at ultrafast speeds with few-fJ/bit energy consumption.

    • Saket Kaushal
    • , A. Aadhi
    •  & José Azaña

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The superstate configuration in all-perovskite tandem solar cells is disadvantageous for long-term stability. Here, the authors reverse the processing order and demonstrate substrate configuration to bury oxidizable narrow-bandgap perovskites, and achieve efficiency of 25.3% with long stability.

    • Yurui Wang
    • , Renxing Lin
    •  & Hairen Tan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Electro-optic modulators can be useful for imaging, sensing and information processing applications. Here the authors demonstrate an ultra-low drive voltage visible to near infrared range electro-optic modulator in the form of amplitude and phase modulation using thin-film lithium niobate.

    • Dylan Renaud
    • , Daniel Rimoli Assumpcao
    •  & Marko Loncar

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It has been challenging to achieve discernible mechanoluminophore devices under ambient light. Here, authors integrate top-emitting organic light-emitting device and piezoelectric generator on thin polymer substrate for the realization of flexible devices under an ambient illuminance of 3000 lux.

    • Qingyang Zhang
    • , Mengxin Xu
    •  & Cunjiang Yu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Printed organic and inorganic electronics continue to be of large interest for several applications. Here, the authors propose laser printing as a facile process for fabricating printed electronics with minimum feature sizes below 1 µm and demonstrate functional diodes, memristors, and physically unclonable functions.

    • Liang Yang
    • , Hongrong Hu
    •  & Martin Wegener

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors present an implementation of mid-infrared single-photon computational imaging with a single-element silicon detector. In addition to unique features of single-pixel simplicity and room-temperature operation, the infrared imager offers a superior sensitivity at the single-photon level.

    • Yinqi Wang
    • , Kun Huang
    •  & Heping Zeng

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors introduce and demonstrate cross-comb spectroscopy in the mid-infrared as a variant of dual-comb spectroscopy. It provides enhanced performance and allows mid-infrared spectral information to be obtained by near-infrared detection.

    • Mingchen Liu
    • , Robert M. Gray
    •  & Alireza Marandi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Twin-field QKD should allow secure quantum communication with favourable rate-loss scaling, but requires interferometric implementations which are often impractical for long distances. Here, the authors show how to realise it without the need for closed interferometers.

    • Lai Zhou
    • , Jinping Lin
    •  & Zhiliang Yuan

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    The field of terahertz wireless communication is growing rapidly. Here the authors discuss the challenges for the architectures of wireless platforms above 100 GHz and their potential applications.

    • Josep M. Jornet
    • , Edward W. Knightly
    •  & Daniel M. Mittleman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The high dark current of perovskite photodetectors hinders the full potential of perovskites as active material for X-ray detectors. Here, Jin et al. provide a strategy to reduce the dark current to zero and massively enhance the signal-to-noise ratio of perovskite X-ray detectors and photodetectors.

    • Peng Jin
    • , Yingjie Tang
    •  & Yang (Michael) Yang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Structural colours are of broad interest in recent years, yet the conventional nanofabrication techniques fail to match the requirement for large-scale manufacturing. Here, the authors demonstrate the use of pulsed lasers to write structural colours with widegamut, high-resolution, high-speed while low-cost manufacturability, long-term stability, and viewing-angle independence.

    • Jiao Geng
    • , Liye Xu
    •  & Min Qiu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Resonators are key components in optics. In this work, the authors introduce a class of optical resonators with distinctly different properties from conventional resonators, allowing fundamental design trade-offs to be circumvented.

    • Vincent Ginis
    • , Ileana-Cristina Benea-Chelmus
    •  & Federico Capasso

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Microcombs are vulnerable to the environmental perturbations. Here, the authors propose a universal mechanism to fully control the microcombs. Based this reconfigurable microsoliton, a wavemeter with a precision of kHz is demonstrated.

    • Rui Niu
    • , Ming Li
    •  & Chun-Hua Dong

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Integrating diffractive optical neural networks (DONN) would reduce errors due to bulky components and calibration. Here, the authors exploit integrated 1D dielectric metasurfaces to realise an on-chip DONN device with 90% classification accuracy, computing at 10^16 flops/mm^2 and consuming 10E-17 J/Flop.

    • Tingzhao Fu
    • , Yubin Zang
    •  & Hongwei Chen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Optical neural networks face remarkable challenges in high-level integration and on-chip operation. In this work the authors enable optical convolution utilizing time-wavelength plane stretching approach on a microcomb-driven chip-based photonic processing unit.

    • Bowen Bai
    • , Qipeng Yang
    •  & Xingjun Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Convolutional operation is a very efficient way to handle tensor analytics, but it consumes a large quantity of additional memory. Here, the authors demonstrate an integrated photonic tensor processor which directly handles high-order tensors without tensor-matrix transformation.

    • Shaofu Xu
    • , Jing Wang
    •  & Weiwen Zou

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Traditional learning procedures for artificial intelligence rely on digital methods not suitable for physical hardware. Here, Nakajima et al. demonstrate gradient-free physical deep learning by augmenting a biologically inspired algorithm, accelerating the computation speed on optoelectronic hardware.

    • Mitsumasa Nakajima
    • , Katsuma Inoue
    •  & Kohei Nakajima

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Fabrication errors limit the scaling of programmable photonic circuits. Here the authors show how a broad class of circuits can be made asymptotically fault-tolerant, where the effect of errors remains controlled regardless of the circuit’s size.

    • Ryan Hamerly
    • , Saumil Bandyopadhyay
    •  & Dirk Englund

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Holography recreates both the amplitude and wave front of a three dimensional object, meaning that the observer perceives the image in the nearly same way as they would the true object. Creating such holographic images is challenging computationally, and requires extremely fast display update. Here, the authors combine a fast memoryless computation algorithm with the ultra-rapid writing based on all-optical switching of a ferrimagnetic film.

    • M. Makowski
    • , J. Bomba
    •  & A. Stupakiewicz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A unified metric to assess the performances of quantum transducers, i.e., converters of quantum information between different physical systems - is still lacking. Here the authors propose quantum capacity as such metric, and use it to investigate the optimal designs of generic quantum transduction schemes.

    • Chiao-Hsuan Wang
    • , Fangxin Li
    •  & Liang Jiang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    THz imaging and spectroscopy always request even more efficient components. Here the authors, thanks to a modified photoconductive switch that includes a graphene layer, demonstrate a high-speed photoconductive switch without sacrificing the generated power.

    • Dehui Zhang
    • , Zhen Xu
    •  & Zhaohui Zhong

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Efficient and broadband visible-light photodetectors will bring great advantages in applications such as biosensing and quantum information. Here the authors develop a photodetector with high quantum efficiency across broad wavelength range suitable for monolithic integration in photonics circuits.

    • Yiding Lin
    • , Zheng Yong
    •  & Joyce K. S. Poon

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Fibre-based entanglement distribution represents a key primitive for quantum applications such as QKD. Here, the authors demonstrate it across 248 km of deployed fiber, observing stable detected pair rates of 9 Hz for 110 h.

    • Sebastian Philipp Neumann
    • , Alexander Buchner
    •  & Rupert Ursin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Improving the image depth perception of holograms while maintaining high image quality is a current challenge. Here the authors propose an efficient solution relying on a multi-plane hologram technique that reconstruct different blurred images and sharply focused images depending on a propagation distance.

    • Daeho Yang
    • , Wontaek Seo
    •  & Hong-Seok Lee

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The use of light in driving the magnetization of materials has great technological potential, as well as allowing for insights into the fast dynamics of magnetic systems. Here, the authors combine CrI3, a van der Waals magnet, with WSe2, and demonstrate all optical switching of the resulting heterostructure.

    • Maciej Da̧browski
    • , Shi Guo
    •  & Robert J. Hicken

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