Optical materials and structures articles from across Nature Portfolio

Material designs with multicolor circularly polarized emissions are desirable for photonic applications. Here, the authors report supramolecular glasses based on self-assembled chiral metal–organic complexes with color-tunable circularly polarized afterglow.

Fast and high-resolution Fourier transform spectrometers are indispensable for cutting-edge infrared spectroscopy. In this study, the authors employed a newly-designed fast-rotating retroreflective, broadband delay line demonstrating fast dual-comb spectroscopy with a single mid-infrared optical comb from a quantum cascade laser emitting at 8 micrometers.

“Previous studies investigating the creation of optical frequency combs through parametric modulation of microresonators rely on lumped-element models that do not consider how the modulations are spatially distributed. The current study underscores the crucial role of these spatial distributions in SNAP bottle microresonators, particularly in producing optical frequency combs with low repetition rate.

Magnetic meta-atoms made from lanthanum-doped barium hexaferrite can be used to create self-biased non-reciprocal metasurfaces capable of unidirectional transmission, non-reciprocal beam steering, non-reciprocal beam focusing and non-reciprocal holography.

Topological lasers often suffer from low directionality, and/or complex design requirements hindering operation at small wavelengths. Here, by using a few monolayers of perovskite quantum dots, the authors demonstrate a lithography-free, vertical-emitting, single-mode laser emitting in the green.