Optics and photonics articles within Nature Communications

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  • 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

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Methods for generating macroscopic chiral matter struggle with limited scalability. Here, the authors show two vacuum filtration methods - twist stacking and mechanical rotation - to align carbon nanotubes into chiral structures at wafer scale with tunable circular dichroism.

    • Jacques Doumani
    • , Minhan Lou
    •  & Weilu Gao

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Current approaches to distinguish topological phases from topologically-trivial phases have limited general applicability. Here, in a photonic-crystal context, the authors demonstrate that in trivial structures the bulk local density of states (LDOS) extends all the way to the edges and corners, while in topological structures the bulk LDOS actually avoids the edges and corners.

    • Biye Xie
    • , Renwen Huang
    •  & Shuang Zhang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Structured light has proven useful for numerous photonic applications. However, its current use in optical fibers is severely limited. The authors report a highly integrated metafiber platform based on 3D laser nanoprinting, capable of creating arbitrarily structured light.

    • Chenhao Li
    • , Torsten Wieduwilt
    •  & Haoran Ren

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Low-cost manufacturing of large-scale thermally activated delayed fluorescence organic light-emitting diodes has been restricted due to their incompatibility with solution processing techniques. Here, authors develop inkjet printing ink formulation to fabricate patterns without use of lithography.

    • Chandra Kant
    • , Atul Shukla
    •  & Monica Katiyar

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Methods to characterize the free-electron laser pulses are evolving and their performances are also improving. Here the authors demonstrate a method based on the artificial neural networks to predict the output pulses of the X-ray free-electron laser by considering the electron beam parameters as input.

    • Kenan Li
    • , Guanqun Zhou
    •  & Anne Sakdinawat

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mie resonances are typically manipulated through varying nanostructure shape/size. Here, authors found that Gaussian beam displacement excites higher-order multipolar modes, not accessible by plane wave, featuring maximal linear and nonlinear scattering efficiency when the focus is misaligned.

    • Yu-Lung Tang
    • , Te-Hsin Yen
    •  & Shi-Wei Chu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Circularly polarized light adds a unique dimension to optical information processing and communication. Here, the authors present a development of a photonic artificial synapse device using chiral perovskite hybrid materials and carbon nanotubes. The heterostructure exhibits efficient synaptic and neuromorphic behaviors, enabling accurate recognition of circularly polarized images.

    • Qi Liu
    • , Qi Wei
    •  & Mingjie Li

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors demonstrate a very stable yet broadly tunable photonic THz source, characterized from 2 GHz to 1.4 THz. A very narrow Lamb dip feature is observed in a water absorption line, showcasing its potential for sub-kHz resolution spectroscopy.

    • Léo Djevahirdjian
    • , Loïc Lechevallier
    •  & Samir Kassi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Feedback oscillators are a fundamental tool in science and engineering. Here, Loughlin and Sudhir provide a generalized Schawlow-Townes-like formula for quantum-limited feedback oscillators, thus giving a general model to study the fundamental output noise of these devices and techniques to reduce their noise further.

    • Hudson A. Loughlin
    •  & Vivishek Sudhir

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Optoelectronic neural networks are a promising avenue in AI computing for parallelization, power efficiency, and speed. Here, the authors present a dual-neuron optical-artificial learning approach for training large-scale diffractive neural networks, achieving VGG-level performance on ImageNet in simulation with a network that is 10 times larger than existing ones.

    • Xiaoyun Yuan
    • , Yong Wang
    •  & Lu Fang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The development of chemically diverse boron-oxygen-fused polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons has been limited by their synthetic complexity. Here, authors report a one-pot strategy for their facile synthesis and demonstrate their potential as ultralong afterglow and host materials for deep-blue OLEDs.

    • Guijie Li
    • , Kewei Xu
    •  & Yuan-Bin She

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors showcase a method to design negative lumped elements by engineering the effective permittivity within the waveguide, which enables realizations of wideband waveguide metatronics and promises performance enhancement in various fields.

    • Xu Qin
    • , Pengyu Fu
    •  & Yue Li

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Designing an efficient activation function for optical neural networks remains a challenge. Here, the authors demonstrate a modulator-detector-in-one graphene/silicon heterojunction ring resonators enabling on-chip reconfigurable activation function devices with phase activation capability for optical neural networks.

    • Chuyu Zhong
    • , Kun Liao
    •  & Hongtao Lin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Preparation of photodiodes with photomultiplication/photovoltaic two operating modes is promising but challenging. Here, the authors report a bias-switchable dual-mode organic photodiode by adopting traps and blocking layer, achieving detectivity of 1012 Jones and fast response speed in both modes.

    • Qingxia Liu
    • , Lingfeng Li
    •  & Yadong Jiang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Deep imaging in complex scattering media is hindered by multiple light scattering. Here, the authors proposed a method to trace multiple scattering trajectories in situ using a recorded reflection matrix and achieved enhanced imaging depth by converting these multiple scattering to signal waves.

    • Sungsam Kang
    • , Yongwoo Kwon
    •  & Wonshik Choi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Highly reflective surfaces are notorious in 3D sensing because they can cause errors in depth perception. Here, the authors devise a polarization structured light 3D sensor for this problem, in which high-contrast-grating VCSELs are used. Experiments are reported to demonstrate the sensor can be used to see and see through the highly reflective surfaces.

    • Xuanlun Huang
    • , Chenyang Wu
    •  & Connie J. Chang-Hasnain

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Light-responsive polymers with polarization-dependent deformation are promising material to develop tunable devices usually limited by irreversible dynamic control. Here, the authors use controlled polarization of visible light to produce arbitrary deformations into amorphous composites containing azopolymer microdomains to unlock the next level of complex actuation in soft lightdriven robots.

    • David Urban
    • , Niccolò Marcucci
    •  & Emiliano Descrovi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Researchers demonstrate robust optical communication around fully opaque occlusions, partially or entirely blocking the light path, using a pair of electronic encoder and passive diffractive decoder that are jointly optimized using deep learning.

    • Md Sadman Sakib Rahman
    • , Tianyi Gan
    •  & Aydogan Ozcan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    van der Waals materials are usually characterized by a significant out-of-plane optical anisotropy, but in-plane birefringence is also necessary for photonics applications. Here, the authors report the presence of broadband optical anisotropy in a layered material, Ta2NiS5, showing in-plane birefringence of ~2 and ~0.5 in the visible and mid-infrared range, respectively.

    • Yanze Feng
    • , Runkun Chen
    •  & Shaojuan Li

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Gan et al. have developed sodium polyacrylate-based films for passive radiative cooling that can be fabricated using atmospheric moisture alone, offering radiative and evaporative cooling, reducing temperatures by up to 5 °C under partly cloudy skies.

    • Roisul Hasan Galib
    • , Yanpei Tian
    •  & Qiaoqiang Gan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Laser machining can modify and reshape materials on the scale comparable to light’s wavelength. Here, authors use tailored microstructures to push the limit of laser machining to a scale that is almost 100 times smaller than a wavelength of light.

    • Maxim R. Shcherbakov
    • , Giovanni Sartorello
    •  & Gennady Shvets

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The Authors present an exciting dielectric waveguide mechanism that can confine light in regions of varying sizes, unlike conventional designs. The platform offers a unique blend of properties by leveraging radiation modes while minimizing optical losses. This work holds promise for serving as the next generation of fundamental building blocks for integrated photonics applications.

    • Janderson R. Rodrigues
    • , Utsav D. Dave
    •  & Michal Lipson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In this work the authors develop a Random optical parametric oscillator - the parametric analogous of random lasers. This system shows improved key metrics like tuneable repetition rates, tuneable pulse duration, inter-pulse coherence as well as simpler configuration compared with standard systems.

    • Pedro Tovar
    • , Jean Pierre von der Weid
    •  & Xiaoyi Bao

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Phosphor efficiency can be improved via materials development or structural engineering, the latter only begun lately. Here the authors propose and investigate simple vertical resonant cavity as a platform for nanostructurally engineered phosphor.

    • Tae-Yun Lee
    • , Yeonsang Park
    •  & Heonsu Jeon

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here, the authors experimentally discover a class of higher-order Weyl semimetal phase in a three-dimensional photonic crystal, exhibiting the concurrence of the surface and hinge Fermi arcs from the nonzero Chern number and the nontrivial generalized real Chern number, respectively, coined a real higher-order Weyl photonic crystals.

    • Yuang Pan
    • , Chaoxi Cui
    •  & Yihao Yang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors present a comprehensive framework for on-demand dispersion control with a single-layer metasurface, particularly in an ultra-broad bandwidth. An achromatic metalens spanning the visible and near-infrared spectra is experimentally demonstrated.

    • Yueqiang Hu
    • , Yuting Jiang
    •  & Huigao Duan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors develop a method for sub-diffraction near-field imaging using measurements taken relatively far from an object, amplifying evanescent waves that encode the highest resolution. The increased distance greatly reduces the perturbation of the fields by the imaging device itself.

    • Alessandro Tuniz
    •  & Boris T. Kuhlmey

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here the authors provide the experimental demonstration of a widely tunable integrated frequency comb source unlocking the spectrum from the visible to the mid-infrared in a thin-film lithium niobate platform.

    • Arkadev Roy
    • , Luis Ledezma
    •  & Alireza Marandi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors demonstrate here a method for the production of arbitrarily long, light-guiding microstructured fibers with shape-memory properties. The showcased design of adaptative fibers here holds potential for the development of functional actuators and sensors.

    • Clément Strutynski
    • , Marianne Evrard
    •  & Frédéric Smektala

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