Optics and photonics articles within Nature

Featured

  • Article |

    Branched flow of light is experimentally observed inside a thin soap membrane, where smooth variations of the membrane thickness transform the light beam into branched filaments of enhanced intensity that keep dividing as the waves propagate.

    • Anatoly Patsyk
    • , Uri Sivan
    •  & Miguel A. Bandres

  • Article |

    Laser-generated high-harmonic emission is used to image the valence potential and electron density in magnesium fluoride and calcium fluoride at the picometre scale, enabling direct probing of material properties.

    • H. Lakhotia
    • , H. Y. Kim
    •  & E. Goulielmakis

  • Article |

    Combining thermal scanning-probe lithography with templating enables the production of high-quality gratings that manipulate light through Fourier-spectrum engineering in ways that are not achievable with conventional gratings.

    • Nolan Lassaline
    • , Raphael Brechbühler
    •  & David J. Norris

  • Article |

    A turnkey regime for soliton microcombs is demonstrated, in which solitons are generated by switching on a co-integrated pump laser, eliminating the need for photonic and electronic control circuitry.

    • Boqiang Shen
    • , Lin Chang
    •  & John E. Bowers

  • Article |

    Wave destabilization is demonstrated in semiconductor ring lasers operating at low pumping levels, where ultrafast gain recovery leads to the emergence of a frequency comb regime owing to phase turbulence.

    • Marco Piccardo
    • , Benedikt Schwarz
    •  & Federico Capasso

  • News & Views |

    A Laughlin state is a phase of matter that has remarkable features, such as excitations that behave as a fraction of a particle. The long-sought creation of a photonic Laughlin state is a milestone for the field of quantum simulation.

    • Laura Corman

  • Article |

    The coupling between light and relativistic free electrons is enhanced through phase matching of electrons with optical whispering-gallery modes in dielectric microspheres and through extended modal lifetimes.

    • Ofer Kfir
    • , Hugo Lourenço-Martins
    •  & Claus Ropers

  • Article |

    The strong interaction of coherent free electrons with a photonic-crystal cavity enables the measurement of the lifetimes of the cavity modes and provides a technique for multidimensional near-field imaging and spectroscopy.

    • Kangpeng Wang
    • , Raphael Dahan
    •  & Ido Kaminer

  • Article |

    Pairs of photons in the Laughlin state are created by mimicking a fractional quantum Hall system using the synthetic magnetic field induced by a twisted optical cavity and Rydberg-mediated polariton interactions.

    • Logan W. Clark
    • , Nathan Schine
    •  & Jonathan Simon

  • Article |

    A massively parallel coherent light detection and ranging (lidar) scheme using a soliton microcomb—a light source that emits a wide spectrum of sharp lines with equally spaced frequencies—is described.

    • Johann Riemensberger
    • , Anton Lukashchuk
    •  & Tobias J. Kippenberg

  • News & Views |

    Silicon used for electronics has a cubic crystal lattice, which makes the material unsuitable for photonics applications. A method for producing germanium and silicon–germanium alloys that have hexagonal lattices offers a solution.

    • Anna Fontcuberta i Morral

  • Article |

    Coupling the spins of many nitrogen–vacancy centres in a trapped diamond to its orientation produces a spin-dependent torque and spin-cooling of the motion of the diamond.

    • T. Delord
    • , P. Huillery
    •  & G. Hétet

  • News & Views |

    An image-sensor array has been developed that acts as its own artificial neural network to capture and identify optical images simultaneously, processing the information rapidly without needing to convert it to a digital format.

    • Yang Chai

  • Article |

    A two-dimensional semiconductor photodiode array senses and processes optical images simultaneously without latency, and is trained to classify and encode images with high throughput, acting as an artificial neural network.

    • Lukas Mennel
    • , Joanna Symonowicz
    •  & Thomas Mueller

  • News & Views |

    Devices known as quantum cascade lasers produce useful terahertz radiation, but are typically highly sensitive to fabrication defects. This limitation has now been overcome using a property called topological robustness.

    • Sunil Mittal
    •  & Edo Waks

  • Article |

    A topological laser based on the valley degree of freedom in a compact photonic crystal can be pumped electrically, bringing topological physics concepts closer to real-life applications.

    • Yongquan Zeng
    • , Udvas Chattopadhyay
    •  & Qi Jie Wang

  • News & Views |

    The reliance of infrared spectroscopy on light transmission limits the sensitivity of many analytical applications. An approach that depends on the emission of infrared radiation from molecules promises to solve this problem.

    • Andreas Barth

  • Article |

    A vibrational spectroscopy technique that measures the electric field emitted from organic molecules following infrared illumination allows their molecular fingerprints to be separated from the excitation background, even in complex biological samples.

    • Ioachim Pupeza
    • , Marinus Huber
    •  & Ferenc Krausz

  • News Feature |

    Paints, plastics and even wood can be engineered to stay cool in direct sunlight — but their role in displacing power-hungry air conditioners remains unclear.

    • XiaoZhi Lim

  • Article |

    Conventionally, heat transfer occurs by conduction, convection or radiation, but has also been theoretically predicted to occur through quantum fluctuations across a vacuum; this prediction has now been confirmed experimentally.

    • King Yan Fong
    • , Hao-Kun Li
    •  & Xiang Zhang

  • Article |

    precisely controllable integrated optical gyroscope based on stimulated Brillouin scattering is used to study non-Hermitian physics, revealing a four-fold enhancement of the Sagnac scale factor near exceptional points.

    • Yu-Hung Lai
    • , Yu-Kun Lu
    •  & Kerry Vahala

  • News & Views |

    Scientists have engineered semiconducting nanocrystals called quantum dots that lack toxic heavy metals and are highly efficient light emitters. These nanostructures might be used in displays, solar cells and light-emitting diodes.

    • Alexander L. Efros

  • Article |

    A method of engineering efficient and stable InP/ZnSe/ZnS quantum dot light-emitting diodes (QD-LEDs) has improved their performance to the level of state-of-the-art cadmium-containing QD-LEDs, removing the problem of the toxicity of cadmium in large-panel displays.

    • Yu-Ho Won
    • , Oul Cho
    •  & Eunjoo Jang

  • News & Views |

    The ability of structures called optical resonators to trap light is often limited by scattering of light off fabrication defects. A physical mechanism that suppresses this scattering has been reported that could lead to improved optical devices.

    • Kirill Koshelev
    •  & Yuri Kivshar

  • Letter |

    The transition energy of the first excited state of 229Th to the ground state is determined through the measurement of internal conversion electrons to correspond to a wavelength of 149.7 ± 3.1 nanometres.

    • Benedict Seiferle
    • , Lars von der Wense
    •  & Peter G. Thirolf

  • Letter |

    Multi-qubit entangling gates are realized by simultaneously driving multiple motional modes of a linear chain of trapped ions with modulated external fields, achieving a fidelity of about 93 per cent with four qubits.

    • Yao Lu
    • , Shuaining Zhang
    •  & Kihwan Kim

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