Optics and photonics articles within Nature

Featured

  • Letter |

    The magnetic properties of a ferromagnetic layer stack are controlled on attosecond timescales through optically induced spin and orbital momentum transfer, demonstrating a coherent regime of ultrafast magnetism.

    • Florian Siegrist
    • , Julia A. Gessner
    •  & Martin Schultze

  • News & Views |

    The formation of microscopic pores and fibrils in polymers under stress — a process called crazing — often preludes material failure. Controlled crazing has now been used to produce an array of colours in polymer films.

    • Seung Hwan Ko

  • News & Views |

    Experiments show how an all-optical version of an artificial neural network — a type of artificial-intelligence system — could potentially deliver better energy efficiency can conventional computing approaches.

    • Geoffrey W. Burr

  • Letter |

    A low-power, fixed microwave signal in combination with an optical-pump signal generates an optical frequency comb that spans the whole wavelength range of the telecommunications C-band, with possible applications ranging from spectroscopy to optical communications.

    • Alfredo Rueda
    • , Florian Sedlmeir
    •  & Harald G. L. Schwefel

  • Letter |

    Electro-optic detection in a nonlinear crystal is used to measure coherence properties of vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field and deduce the spectrum of the ground state of electromagnetic radiation.

    • Ileana-Cristina Benea-Chelmus
    • , Francesca Fabiana Settembrini
    •  & Jérôme Faist

  • News & Views |

    A vacuum as described by quantum mechanics is perhaps the most fundamental but mysterious state in physics. The discovery of correlations between electric-field fluctuations in such a vacuum represents a major advance.

    • Andrey S. Moskalenko
    •  & Timothy C Ralph

  • News & Views |

    A spectroscopic imaging method has reached a resolution 1,000 times better than the limits of standard optical imaging techniques — and reveals vibrational modes of molecules previously seen only in computational models.

    • Eric C. Le Ru

  • Letter |

    Room-temperature modulation frequencies exceeding 200 GHz are demonstrated in birefringent semiconductor spin-lasers by coupling the spin of the charge carriers to the light polarization.

    • Markus Lindemann
    • , Gaofeng Xu
    •  & Nils C. Gerhardt

  • News & Views |

    How Nature reported the discovery of formaldehyde in space in 1969, and an explanation of iridescent colouration from 1919.

  • News & Views |

    Iridescent colours have been observed to be reflected from specially designed droplets of colourless liquids, with the reflected colour depending on the viewing angle. The finding reveals a curious mechanism for creating coloration.

    • Kenneth Chau

  • Letter |

    A spatially oscillating two-dimensional waveguide array is used to realize a photonic topological insulator in synthetic dimensions with modal-space edge states, unidirectionality and robust topological protection.

    • Eran Lustig
    • , Steffen Weimann
    •  & Mordechai Segev

  • News & Views |

    It is well established that solid objects can be cooled by harnessing the properties of laser light. A laser-free technique that attains such cooling by tuning thermal radiation could have many practical applications.

    • Yannick De Wilde
    •  & Riad Haidar

  • Letter |

    Waveguide quantum electrodynamics is used to couple a single collective excitation of an atomic array to a nanoscale waveguide; the excitation is stored and later read out, generating guided single photons on demand.

    • Neil V. Corzo
    • , Jérémy Raskop
    •  & Julien Laurat

  • News & Views |

    The perception range of an ordinary camera can be extended by analysing information contained in shadows. This finding could have technological implications for robotic, automotive and medical sensing.

    • Martin Laurenzis

  • Letter |

    A faint penumbra in a photograph of a diffuse surface enables recovery of the position of the object creating the penumbra and an image of the scene behind it.

    • Charles Saunders
    • , John Murray-Bruce
    •  & Vivek K Goyal

  • Letter |

    A three-dimensional photonic topological insulator is presented, made of split-ring resonators with strong magneto-electric coupling, which has an extremely wide topological bandgap, forbidding light propagation.

    • Yihao Yang
    • , Zhen Gao
    •  & Hongsheng Chen

  • Letter |

    Terahertz light pulses induce transitions between a topological and a trivial phase in the Weyl semimetal WTe2 through an interlayer shear strain.

    • Edbert J. Sie
    • , Clara M. Nyby
    •  & Aaron M. Lindenberg

  • Letter |

    A refractive lens and a refractive prism for extreme-ultraviolet radiation have been developed that use the deflection of the radiation in an inhomogeneous jet of atoms.

    • L. Drescher
    • , O. Kornilov
    •  & B. Schütte

  • Letter |

    Improved techniques allow the measurement of a frequency difference with an uncertainty of the order of 10–19 between two independent atomic optical lattice clocks, suggesting that they may be able to improve state-of-the-art geodetic techniques.

    • W. F. McGrew
    • , X. Zhang
    •  & A. D. Ludlow

  • News & Views |

    A strategy for using organic free radicals to make light-emitting diodes circumvents the constraints that limit the efficiency with which other organic LEDs convert electric current into light.

    • Tetsuro Kusamoto
    •  & Hiroshi Nishihara

  • Perspective |

    This Perspective discusses developments in LED-based solid-state lighting for physiological and agricultural applications, and the anticipated benefits in terms of health and productivity.

    • P. M. Pattison
    • , J. Y. Tsao
    •  & B. Bugbee

  • Letter |

    Cooperative quantum effects in superlattices of quantum dots made of caesium lead halide perovskite give rise to superfluorescence, with the individual emitters interacting coherently to give intense bursts of light.

    • Gabriele Rainò
    • , Michael A. Becker
    •  & Thilo Stöferle

  • News & Views |

    The control of quantum systems offers great potential for advanced information-processing and sensing applications. An approach has been demonstrated that enables such control over the motion of mechanical oscillators.

    • Michael R. Vanner

  • Article |

    The displacement of a mechanical resonator is measured to within 35% of the Heisenberg uncertainty limit, enabling feedback cooling to the quantum ground state, nine decibels below the quantum-backaction limit.

    • Massimiliano Rossi
    • , David Mason
    •  & Albert Schliesser

  • News & Views |

    A natural material has been discovered that exhibits an extreme optical property known as in-plane hyperbolicity. The finding could lead to infrared optical components that are much smaller than those now available.

    • Thomas G. Folland
    •  & Joshua D. Caldwell

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