Physics articles within Nature Photonics

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  • Letter |

    Room-temperature lasing in core–shell–cap GaAs/AlGaAs/GaAs nanowires is demonstrated using optical pumping. It is realized by employing a Fabry–Pérot cavity along with material optimization and surface recombination minimization. This demonstration should prove useful for designing nanoscale optoelectronic devices operating at near-infrared wavelengths.

    • Dhruv Saxena
    • , Sudha Mokkapati
    •  & Chennupati Jagadish

  • Letter |

    A continuous-variable cluster state containing more than 10,000 entangled modes is deterministically generated and fully characterized. The developed time-domain multiplexing method allows each quantum mode to be manipulated by the same optical components at different times. An efficient scheme for measurement-based quantum computation on this cluster state is presented.

    • Shota Yokoyama
    • , Ryuji Ukai
    •  & Akira Furusawa

  • Letter |

    Two-, three- and higher multiphoton absorption processes are shown to occur in amyloid protein fibres, which are thought to play a role in various diseases, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. The nonlinear optical behaviour of such proteins may also be useful for fabricating photonics devices.

    • Piotr Hanczyc
    • , Marek Samoc
    •  & Bengt Norden

  • Letter |

    A simple, rapid and inexpensive nanolithography technique is demonstrated that exploits nonlinear feedback mechanisms to tightly regulate the formation of nanostructures induced by femtosecond laser pulses. The nonlocal nature of the feedback allows the nanostructures to be seamlessly stitched, resulting in large-area nanostructuring whose periodicity is uniform on a subnanometre scale.

    • Bülent Öktem
    • , Ihor Pavlov
    •  & F. Ömer Ilday

  • News & Views |

    Vertically aligned nanowires on a solid surface in conjunction with table-top lasers create an ultrahigh-energy-density plasma with extremely high ionization in the laboratory.

    • Lap Van Dao
    •  & Peter Hannaford

  • Review Article |

    Laser-driven plasma accelerators have the potential to replace existing particle accelerators, as they are highly efficient systems that are orders of magnitude smaller than conventional particle accelerators. This review discusses recent progress and future challenges in this area.

    • S. M. Hooker

  • Letter |

    A chip-compatible beamsplitter that can separate left- and right-handed circularly polarized light is promising for constructing more sophisticated integrated optical circuits. The prism-shaped device, which operates around the telecommunication wavelength of 1.5 μm, consists of a photonic crystal composed of an array of helical structures.

    • Mark D. Turner
    • , Matthias Saba
    •  & Min Gu

  • Letter |

    Femtosecond laser pulses were used to heat dense matter, converting it into an extremely hot plasma. 52-times ionized gold was achieved as well as gigabar pressures, which can be exceeded only in the central hot spots of thermonuclear fusion plasmas.

    • Michael A. Purvis
    • , Vyacheslav N. Shlyaptsev
    •  & Jorge J. Rocca

  • Review Article |

    Recent progress on terahertz-emission devices based on the high-temperature superconductor Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+δ is reviewed. The emission mechanism is explained as a result of collective resonant modes in a stack of intrinsic Josephson junctions. Remarkable features of the linewidth, tunability, the optimum bias condition and the thermal influence are discussed.

    • Ulrich Welp
    • , Kazuo Kadowaki
    •  & Reinhold Kleiner

  • Article |

    The long-standing problem of determining the classical communication capacities of Gaussian bosonic channels is addressed by determining upper and lower bounds for the classical capacities of important active and passive bosonic channels. The results apply to any bosonic thermal-noise channel, including electromagnetic signaling at any frequency.

    • Vittorio Giovannetti
    • , Seth Lloyd
    •  & Jeffrey H. Shapiro

  • Article |

    A terahertz pulse shaper based on optical rectification is proposed. The polarization of the terahertz pulses depends on the polarization selection rules for the rectification process in a GaP crystal. The terahertz pulse shaper can arbitrarily control the chirality, phase, pulse duration and frequency of circularly polarized few-cycle terahertz pulses.

    • Masaaki Sato
    • , Takuya Higuchi
    •  & Makoto Kuwata-Gonokami

  • News & Views |

    Further sensitivity improvements are required before advanced optical interferometers will be able to measure gravitational waves. A team has now shown that introducing quantum squeezing of light may help to detect these elusive waves.

    • Ulrik L. Andersen

  • News & Views |

    Caging pairs of propagating solitons in a fibre ring resonator allows scientists to observe the solitons travelling astronomical distances, revealing the effects of extremely tiny forces exerted by the leading soliton on the trailing one.

    • Franco Prati

  • Article |

    A miniature spectrometer has been developed that employs light scattering in a photonic chip with a random structure. It generates wavelength-dependent speckle patterns, which are detected and analysed to recover the spectrum of the input signal. It has a resolution of 0.75 nm in the 1,500 nm wavelength region.

    • Brandon Redding
    • , Seng Fatt Liew
    •  & Hui Cao

  • Article |

    By employing monocrystalline semiconductor materials as high-quality optical coatings, the long-standing challenge of minimizing the optical phase noise produced by Brownian motion in a multilayer has been overcome. A thermally limited noise floor consistent with a tenfold reduction in mechanical damping relative to that in the best dielectric multilayers is achieved.

    • Garrett D. Cole
    • , Wei Zhang
    •  & Markus Aspelmeyer

  • Letter |

    Nonlinear optics can overcome the diffraction limit through the presence and interaction of many photons. Abbe's diffraction theory is now generalized to include spatial nonlinearity, and wave mixing is treated as a self-induced structured illumination, thereby allowing a standard imaging system to be nonlinearly enhanced beyond its conventional limits.

    • Christopher Barsi
    •  & Jason W. Fleischer

  • Letter |

    An ultrafast terahertz (THz) scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) with subpicosecond time resolution and nanometre spatial resolution has been developed. THz pulses are coupled to the metal tip of a commercial STM and THz-pulse-induced tunnelling is observed in the STM. The THz-STM can directly image ultrafast carrier capture by a single InAs nanodot.

    • Tyler L. Cocker
    • , Vedran Jelic
    •  & Frank A. Hegmann

  • Article |

    An all-optical photonic streaking measurement is demonstrated that provides direct experimental access to individual attosecond pulses. The effects of non-adiabatic electron dynamics and plasma formation on the generated attosecond pulse train are directly observed when the pulse train is applied to harmonic generation in gases.

    • Kyung Taec Kim
    • , Chunmei Zhang
    •  & F. Quéré

  • Article |

    Recirculating temporal optical cavity solitons in a coherently driven passive optical fibre ring resonator allows pairs of solitons to interact over distances 8,000 times their width. This finding highlights the extreme stability, robustness and coherence of the process, and of solitons in general.

    • Jae K. Jang
    • , Miro Erkintalo
    •  & Stéphane Coen

  • News & Views |

    Scientists experimentally demonstrate a scheme that allows the number of qubits encoded per photon to be varied while keeping the overall quantum information constant. They also propose the inverse 'splitting' process.

    • Jonas Schou Neergaard-Nielsen

  • News & Views |

    Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy is normally associated with the enhanced electric fields that arise near metal nanoparticle surfaces. The contribution of field gradients has been unclear, but new research provides insights into their effect.

    • Christine M. Aikens
    • , Lindsey R. Madison
    •  & George C. Schatz

  • News & Views |

    Small-scale quantum computers made from an array of interconnected waveguides on a glass chip can now perform a task that is considered hard to undertake on a large scale by classical means.

    • T. C. Ralph

  • Letter |

    Researchers demonstrate a laser interferometer that achieves simultaneous nonclassical readout of two conjugated observables. Because their system uses steady-state entanglement, it does not require any conditioning or post-selection. By distinguishing between scientific and parasitic signals, its sensitivity exceeds the standard quantum limit by about 6 dB.

    • Sebastian Steinlechner
    • , Jöran Bauchrowitz
    •  & Roman Schnabel

  • Letter |

    A fibre-laser-pumped optical parametric amplifier for high-harmonic generation has been used to realize a megahertz-repetition-rate source of extreme-ultraviolet continua, with evidence of isolated attosecond pulses at 0.6 MHz. This technique could potentially enable a vast array of new applications, such as attosecond-resolution coincidence and photoelectron spectroscopy.

    • Manuel Krebs
    • , Steffen Hädrich
    •  & Andreas Tünnermann

  • News & Views |

    Enhancing magneto-optic effects may help to reduce the size of photonic devices. Recent research by several groups shows that the features of metal optical components can be exploited to enhance typically weak magneto-optic effects.

    • Ming Liu
    •  & Xiang Zhang

  • News & Views |

    Nanophotonics is of both fundamental and applied importance. This field has a wide range of applications, including light-emitting devices and optical integrated circuits.

    • Noriaki Horiuchi

  • Letter |

    An array of pyramidal site-controlled InGaAs1−δNδ quantum dots is grown on a GaAs substrate to reduce the fine-structure splitting of the intermediate single-exciton energy levels to less than 4 μeV. The quantum dots emit polarization-entangled photons at a maximum fidelity of 0.721 ± 0.043 without external manipulation of the electronic states.

    • Gediminas Juska
    • , Valeria Dimastrodonato
    •  & Emanuele Pelucchi

  • Letter |

    The first true quantum non-demolition measurement of atomic spins by paramagnetic Faraday rotation in a quantum atom–light interface is described. By using an ensemble of 87Rb atoms, quantum state preparation and information–damage trade-off are observed beyond their classical limits by 7 and 12 standard deviations, respectively.

    • R. J. Sewell
    • , M. Napolitano
    •  & M. W. Mitchell

  • Letter |

    The boson-sampling problem is experimentally solved by implementing Aaronson and Arkhipov's model of computation with photons in integrated optical circuits. These results set a benchmark for a type of quantum computer that can potentially outperform a conventional computer by using only a few photons and linear optical elements.

    • Max Tillmann
    • , Borivoje Dakić
    •  & Philip Walther

  • Letter |

    Quantum information circuits for ‘quantum joining’ are proposed, in which two qubits of information encoded in the polarization of two photons are re-encoded into the polarization and path degrees of freedom of a single photon, while keeping the overall quantum information constant. The inverse ‘splitting’ process is also proposed.

    • Chiara Vitelli
    • , Nicolò Spagnolo
    •  & Lorenzo Marrucci

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