Optics and photonics articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Near-eye displays are pivotal for building augmented and virtual reality platforms, but hurdles remain in achieving comfort and realistic visual experiences. Here, authors demonstrate compact 3D holographic glasses with focus cues by combining merits of waveguide displays and holographic displays.

    • Changwon Jang
    • , Kiseung Bang
    •  & Douglas Lanman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Transparent absorbers for electromagnetic interference shielding are sought in the terahertz frequency range. The authors demonstrate organohydrogel-elastomer composites based on permittivity gradients, with strong ionic conduction loss, showing high absorption in the 0.5–4.5 THz band.

    • Wenke Xie
    • , Qian Tang
    •  & Qiye Wen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Optical anapoles in nanoresonators result in strong suppression of the electromagnetic radiation, which is challenging to detect in ideal settings. Here, the authors show that fast electrons are a powerful tool to circumvent this challenge due to their ability to access dark modes.

    • Carlos Maciel-Escudero
    • , Andrew B. Yankovich
    •  & Timur O. Shegai

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Wavefront manipulation with metasurfaces is typically limited to low quality factors. Here, the authors show how higher-order Mie modes can be leveraged to design high quality factor optical metasurfaces for wavefront manipulation in two dimensions.

    • Claudio U. Hail
    • , Morgan Foley
    •  & Harry A. Atwater

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Several solid-state defect platforms have been proposed for application as a spin-photon interface in quantum communication networks. Here the authors report spin-selective optical transitions and narrow inhomogeneous spectral distribution of V centers in isotopically-enriched SiC emitting in the telecom O-band.

    • Pasquale Cilibrizzi
    • , Muhammad Junaid Arshad
    •  & Cristian Bonato

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here the authors identify real-space contributions to the characteristics of high-harmonic generation in ReS2 and demonstrate the possibility of laser-controlled emission. They find that the spectrum is not just determined by the band structure, but also by the interference between HHG signals coming from different atoms within the unit cell.

    • Álvaro Jiménez-Galán
    • , Chandler Bossaer
    •  & Giulio Vampa

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Processing of conventional infrared-transparent materials limits their applicability. The authors demonstrate 3D printing of thiol-ene optical components with mid- and long-wave infrared transparency with applications such as reaction temperature monitoring.

    • Piaoran Ye
    • , Zhihan Hong
    •  & Rongguang Liang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Metasurfaces enable all-optical geometric coordinate transformations, converting images with altered pixel spatial relations, which can facilitate fast, energy-efficient preprocessing for tasks like object tracking, or aid in laser manufacturing.

    • Xingwang Zhang
    • , Xiaojie Zhang
    •  & Xingjie Ni

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Developing quantum networks would require reliable sources of coherent quantum light at telecom wavelengths. Here, the authors employ elastic scattering of excitation laser photons on InAs/InP quantum dots to demonstrate the emission of telecom photons with coherence times longer than the Fourier limit.

    • L. Wells
    • , T. Müller
    •  & A. J. Shields

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors report on the experimental observation and characterization of exceptional points above the lasing threshold in photonic crystal nanocavities.

    • Kaiwen Ji
    • , Qi Zhong
    •  & Alejandro M. Yacomotti

  • Article
    | Open Access

    High-dimensional quantum states allow for several advantages in quantum communication, but protocols such as teleportation require additional entangled photons as the dimension increases. Here, the authors show how to transport a high-dimensional quantum state from a bright coherent laser field to a single photon, using two entangled photons as the quantum channel.

    • Bereneice Sephton
    • , Adam Vallés
    •  & Andrew Forbes

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Remote transport of high-dimensional-encoded photonic states could in principle be achieved via quantum teleportation, but with considerable experimental effort. Here, instead, the authors exploit spatial-mode engineered frequency conversion between a coherent wave packet and a single photon to remotely transfer the HD OAM states, also providing a strategy for quantum imaging.

    • Xiaodong Qiu
    • , Haoxu Guo
    •  & Lixiang Chen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Hyperbolic exciton polaritons (HEPs) are anisotropic light-matter excitations with promising applications, but their steady-state observation is challenging. Here, the authors report experimental evidence of HEPs in a van der Waals magnet, CrSBr, via cryogenic infrared near-field microscopy.

    • Francesco L. Ruta
    • , Shuai Zhang
    •  & D. N. Basov

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    The enhanced Coulomb interaction in two dimensions leads to not only tightly bound excitons but also many-particle excitonic complexes: excitons interacting with other quasiparticles, which results in improved and even new exciton properties with better controls. Here, we summarize studies of excitonic complexes in monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides and their moiré heterojunctions, envisioning how to utilize them for exploring quantum many-body physics.

    • Xiaotong Chen
    • , Zhen Lian
    •  & Su-Fei Shi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors propose electron-positron creation by scattering of gamma-rays and polaritons, enabling the synthesis of ultrafast, localized positron sources and introducing the possibility to exploit nanophotonics for particle physics.

    • Valerio Di Giulio
    •  & F. Javier García de Abajo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors demonstrate real-time blind photonic interference cancellation using FPGA-photonic coordinated processing with zero calibration micro-ring resonator control and sub-second cancellation weight identification.

    • Joshua C. Lederman
    • , Weipeng Zhang
    •  & Paul R. Prucnal

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ultrahigh-efficiency and low-threshold yet tunable and compact laser devices are at the base of new functional devices. Here the authors harness a new temperature degree of freedom to realize a tunable photon-phonon collaboratively pumped laser.

    • Yu Fu
    • , Fei Liang
    •  & Yan-Feng Chen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The researchers showcase all-crystalline and hybrid mid-infrared supermirrors with the lowest optical losses ever demonstrated in this wavelength range, representing an unprecedented improvement over any existing mirrors made with any production technology.

    • Gar-Wing Truong
    • , Lukas W. Perner
    •  & Garrett D. Cole

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors uncover a coherent, long-range transport of excitons in organic semiconductors that are strongly coupled to spatially structured plasmon fields by tracing ultrafast Rabi oscillations using two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy.

    • Daniel Timmer
    • , Moritz Gittinger
    •  & Christoph Lienau

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Standard techniques for Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging Microscopy are limited by the electronics to 100’s of picoseconds time resolution. Here, the authors show how to use two-photon interference to perform fluorescence lifetime sensing with picosecond-scale resolution.

    • Ashley Lyons
    • , Vytautas Zickus
    •  & Daniele Faccio

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The photonic applications of hyperbolic phonon polaritons (HPhPs) in anisotropic van der Waals materials are currently limited by their low tunability. Here, the authors report the static and ultrafast wavevector modulation of HPhPs in hexagonal boron nitride by tuning the plasma frequency of doped semiconductor substrates.

    • Mingze He
    • , Joseph R. Matson
    •  & Joshua D. Caldwell

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Low-temperature spectroscopy of single fluorescent molecules can be of use to study dynamics in the nano-environment around them. Here, Smit et al. show that the fluorescence wavelength of molecules on the surface of hexagonal boron-nitride is particularly sensitive to how clean this surface is.

    • Robert Smit
    • , Arash Tebyani
    •  & Michel Orrit

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors introduce an agile, all-fiber laser source with three frequency combs. Three EOM combs from a single laser are expanded in a tri-core nonlinear fiber, maintaining high mutual coherence. This system’s performance is showcased through a 2D four-wave mixing spectroscopy experiment.

    • Eve-Line Bancel
    • , Etienne Genier
    •  & Arnaud Mussot

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Levitated nanoparticles are a new platform for exploring quantum mechanics at macroscopic scales. The authors realize feedback controls of all external degrees of freedom of a nanoparticle, with one translational degree in the quantum ground state.

    • Mitsuyoshi Kamba
    • , Ryoga Shimizu
    •  & Kiyotaka Aikawa

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Antiferromagnets exhibit high frequency magnons, in the THz regime, a point potentially useful for applications, however, it has meant that detecting spin-fluctuations in antiferromagnets is typically too fast for current experimental approaches. Here Weiss et al use femtosecond noise correlation spectroscopy to observe magnon fluctuations in Sm0.7Er0.3FeO3.

    • M. A. Weiss
    • , A. Herbst
    •  & T. Kurihara

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors use deep learning to detect and segment unlabeled and unaltered protein aggregates in living cells from transmitted-light images. The method provides a way to quantitatively study protein aggregation dynamics in a simple, fast and accurate way.

    • Khalid A. Ibrahim
    • , Kristin S. Grußmayer
    •  & Aleksandra Radenovic

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Multi-client demonstrations of blind quantum computation are still missing, due to their high resource overhead. Here, the authors fill this gap, by proposing a more scalable solution based on a recently introduced linear quantum network structure with high modularity, and demonstrating it in the two-client case.

    • Beatrice Polacchi
    • , Dominik Leichtle
    •  & Elham Kashefi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors demonstrate how flexible metasurfaces powered by artificial neural network can dynamically manipulate the EM scattering behavior from an arbitrary surface - an ultimate ambition for many EM stealth and communication problems.

    • Erda Wen
    • , Xiaozhen Yang
    •  & Daniel F. Sievenpiper

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors introduce and demonstrate experimentally a novel fundamental property of nonlinear multimode optical systems, named mode rejection. This paves the way towards a more general idea of all-optical mode control and its related applications.

    • Kunhao Ji
    • , Ian Davidson
    •  & Massimiliano Guasoni

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Nonlinear optical processes like higher-order harmonic generation in solids depend on several factors. Here the authors explore the optical nonlinearity of hexagonal boron nitride and find that enhanced nonlinearity is due to electron-phonon and phonon-polariton couplings.

    • Jared S. Ginsberg
    • , M. Mehdi Jadidi
    •  & Alexander L. Gaeta

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The usual treatment of wave scattering theory relies on a formalism that does not easily allow for probing optimal spectral response. Here, the authors show how an alternative formalism, encoding fundamental principles of causality and passivity, can be used to make sense of complex scattered fields’ structures.

    • Lang Zhang
    • , Francesco Monticone
    •  & Owen D. Miller

  • Article
    | Open Access

    MEMS-based photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are often limited in speed by mechanical resonances. Here the authors report a programmable architecture for PICs which uses mechanical eigenmodes for synchronized, resonantly enhanced optical modulation.

    • Mark Dong
    • , Julia M. Boyle
    •  & Dirk Englund

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In this work, the authors use a surface plasmonic mechanism to efficiently confine TeraHertz photons inside ultrasmall cavities. These plasmonic-based TeraHertz cavities are shown to operate until the ultimate limit that is allowed fundamentally and at which plasmons start to behave in a nonlocal fashion.

    • Ian Aupiais
    • , Romain Grasset
    •  & Yannis Laplace

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The entanglement of fibrous elements produces flexible structures with enhanced strength and resilience to abrasion. Here, the authors report the weaving of organic crystals into flexible and robust patches with plain, twill, and satin topologies of arbitrary porosity, expanding one-dimensional crystals into flexible, two-dimensional planar structures with potential for future applications in flexible electronics.

    • Linfeng Lan
    • , Liang Li
    •  & Hongyu Zhang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors provide an experimental demonstration of magnetic field generation in graphene disks via the inverse Faraday effect. When the disks are illuminated with circularly polarized radiation in resonance with the graphene plasmon frequency, the corresponding rotational motion of the charge carriers gives rise to a unipolar magnetic field.

    • Jeong Woo Han
    • , Pavlo Sai
    •  & Martin Mittendorff

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Designing robust blue organic light-emitting diodes is a long-standing challenge in the display industry. Here, the authors show that electron-induced degradation reactions play a more critical role in the short lifetime of devices with iridium-based emitters under real operational conditions.

    • Jaewook Kim
    • , Joonghyuk Kim
    •  & Woo Youn Kim

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Strong optical excitation near band extrema can drive novel correlated states. Here the authors report a non-equilibrium many-body state in graphite driven by a strong excitation near van Hove singularity, yielding a tenfold increase in optical conductivity attributed to carrier excitations in the flat bands.

    • T. P. H. Sidiropoulos
    • , N. Di Palo
    •  & J. Biegert

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