Ultrafast photonics articles within Nature Photonics

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  • Letter |

    Responses to high-intensity mid-infrared laser light are theoretically investigated in the Haldane system. It is found that the primary electronic response, optical tunnelling and high-harmonic emission are sensitive to the topological phase of matter.

    • R. E. F. Silva
    • , Á. Jiménez-Galán
    •  & M. Ivanov

  • Review Article |

    Front-induced transitions have been used in dispersion-engineered waveguides for frequency conversion, optical delays, and bandwidth and pulse duration manipulation. This Review provides a theoretical description of the subject and highlights the potential for light manipulation in guided optics.

    • Mahmoud A. Gaafar
    • , Toshihiko Baba
    •  & Alexander Yu. Petrov

  • Article |

    Femtosecond laser pulses can generate self-organized nonlinear gratings in nanophotonic waveguides, providing both quasi-phase-matching and group-velocity matching for second-harmonic generation, and enabling simultaneous χ2 and χ3 nonlinear processes for laser-frequency-comb stabilization.

    • Daniel D. Hickstein
    • , David R. Carlson
    •  & Scott B. Papp

  • Article |

    By combining a single-photon time-of-flight camera with computational processing of the spatial and full temporal photon distribution data, an object embedded inside a strongly diffusive medium can be imaged over more than 80 transport mean free paths in a contactless manner on the timescale of the order of 1 s.

    • Ashley Lyons
    • , Francesco Tonolini
    •  & Daniele Faccio

  • Article |

    Optical soliton dynamics in large-core hollow capillary fibres is demonstrated. The findings enable the scaling of soliton effects by several orders of magnitude to the multi-millijoule energy and terawatt peak power levels, and open up opportunities for new-generation table-top light sources for ultrafast strong-field physics and advanced spectroscopy.

    • John C. Travers
    • , Teodora F. Grigorova
    •  & Federico Belli

  • Article |

    Stereo images of gold nanoparticles in a pyramid shape are reconstructed from X-ray coherent diffraction patterns. Depth information is retrieved by computing disparity maps without a priori knowledge of the sample shape.

    • J. Duarte
    • , R. Cassin
    •  & H. Merdji

  • Letter |

    Double-blind holography allows reconstruction of the missing spectral phases and characterization of the unknown signals in both isolated-pulse and double-pulse scenarios, facilitating the study of complex electron dynamics via a single-shot and linear measurement.

    • O. Pedatzur
    • , A. Trabattoni
    •  & N. Dudovich

  • Letter |

    Temporal dissipative soliton formation in a free-space femtosecond enhancement cavity with a thin Kerr medium is reported. Locking a 350-fs, 1,035-nm pulse train with a repetition rate of 100 MHz to this cavity-soliton state generates a 37-fs sech2-shaped pulse with a peak-power enhancement of 3,200.

    • N. Lilienfein
    • , C. Hofer
    •  & I. Pupeza

  • News & Views |

    Exploiting an optical cavity that folds space in time in a conventional lens design provides a novel route for time-resolved imaging and depth sensing.

    • Sylvain Gigan

  • Article |

    By folding large spaces in time using an off-resonant Fabry–Pérot cavity in camera sensors, new capabilities such as ultrafast multi-zoom imaging and ultrafast multispectral imaging, of use for time-resolved imaging and depth-sensing optics, are found.

    • Barmak Heshmat
    • , Matthew Tancik
    •  & Ramesh Raskar

  • News & Views |

    The generation of hot electrons in plasmonic nanostructures is of scientific and technological interest, putting the community under pressure to better understand the hot-electron mechanisms and to increase the light conversion efficiency of plasmonic nanosystems for chemical reactions and photodetection.

    • Rachel Won

  • Letter |

    Using high-temperature gas mixtures as the generation medium to increase the translational velocity of Xe atoms through the focus of a femtosecond enhancement cavity, phase-matched extreme-ultraviolet emission at a repetition rate of 77 MHz and with an average power of ~ 2 mW in a single harmonic order is achieved.

    • Gil Porat
    • , Christoph M. Heyl
    •  & Jun Ye

  • News & Views |

    High-order harmonics in the extreme-ultraviolet regime can be produced and a stable waveform-locked attosecond pulse can be formed when quartz is excited by a strong short-pulsed laser, providing a robust path towards attosecond photonics.

    • Shambhu Ghimire

  • News & Views |

    The polarization state of isolated attosecond pulses generated by high-order harmonic generation can now be manipulated at will. The development opens the door for a multitude of ultrafast experiments to investigate chiral media.

    • Emma R. Simpson
    •  & Johan Mauritsson

  • Article |

    By sending few-microjoule single-cycle terahertz pulses to a segmented terahertz electron accelerator and manipulator, 70 MV m–1 peak acceleration fields, 2 kT m–1 focusing gradients, 140 µrad fs–1 streaking gradient and bunch compression to 100 fs are achieved.

    • Dongfang Zhang
    • , Arya Fallahi
    •  & Franz X. Kärtner

  • Letter |

    Femtosecond X-ray Fourier holography imaging with record-high lateral resolution below 20 nm is demonstrated. Phase information is encoded into the interference of the diffraction patterns of a reference particle with a measurement sample.

    • Tais Gorkhover
    • , Anatoli Ulmer
    •  & Christoph Bostedt

  • News & Views |

    Irradiating arrays of metal nanowires with intense femtosecond laser pulses produces high-brightness picosecond X-ray pulses. By specifically tailoring the plasma properties, up to 20% conversion efficiency of optical light into X-rays can be achieved.

    • Daniel Rolles

  • News & Views |

    Switching the handedness of circularly polarized light requires separately controlling the phases of orthogonal components while maintaining their magnitudes, ideally with gigahertz operation rates. Ultrafast switching has now been realized via all-optical control of birefringent metamaterials.

    • Qiushi Liu
    •  & Ming Liu

  • News & Views |

    A feasible route towards electron microscopy at the attosecond timescale is now possible thanks to the implementation of an optical gating approach.

    • Alberto Simoncig

  • News & Views |

    The direct measurement of few-cycle optical waveforms with arbitrary polarization and weak intensity is now made possible thanks to extreme ultraviolet interferometry with isolated attosecond pulses.

    • Pascal Salières

  • News & Views |

    High-speed control of polarization may lead to ultrafast modulators and help explore polarization-dependent ultrafast dynamics in matter. Now, femtosecond polarization switching is realized through intraband optical excitation in an ultrathin semiconductor layer.

    • Dongfang Li

  • Review Article |

    Photonic time-stretch techniques and their applications are reviewed. The approach enables the observation of signals that are otherwise too short or rapid for conventional measurement.

    • Ata Mahjoubfar
    • , Dmitry V. Churkin
    •  & Bahram Jalali

  • Article |

    An optical method for the temporal and spatial reconstruction of the electric field of few-cycle pulses is developed. The method is based on two attosecond technologies: extreme-ultraviolet interferometry and a directional electric field detector.

    • P. Carpeggiani
    • , M. Reduzzi
    •  & G. Sansone

  • Letter |

    A laser–plasma accelerator delivering 5-MeV electrons at kHz repetition rate is demonstrated. It is achieved in the laser-wakefield-acceleration regime by using a multi-mJ laser system delivering near-single-cycle laser pulses of 3.4-fs duration.

    • D. Guénot
    • , D. Gustas
    •  & J. Faure

  • News & Views |

    Combining attosecond science and nanophotonics potentially offers a route to enhance control over light–matter interactions at the nanoscale and provide a promising platform for information processing.

    • Giulio Vampa
    • , Hanieh Fattahi
    •  & Ferenc Krausz

  • News & Views |

    The emission direction and timing of extreme-ultraviolet light can now be manipulated through an opto-optical approach that uses an infrared pulse to control the spatial and spectral phase of free induction decay resulting from atoms excited by attosecond light.

    • Taro Sekikawa
    •  & Kenichi L. Ishikawa

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