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Due to dispersion, the group velocity of laser pulses propagating in plasmas slows down with increasing wavelength, which presents challenges for precision-controlled plasma interactions. Now, new techniques for spatio-temporal pulse shaping have lifted this limitation in the demonstration of short-pulse table-top soft X-ray lasers.
The Ti:Sa laser, a workhorse of any optics laboratory, is typically a bench-top system. A hybrid integration approach now enables a low-threshold photonic-circuit-integrated Ti:Sa laser the size of a fingernail.
A photothermal microscopy technique overcomes the diffraction limit by exploiting the spatiotemporal dynamics of heat dissipation within the imaging volume, offering new opportunities for super-resolution, bond-selective and label-free imaging of biological targets.
In recent decades, progress in developing better nonlinear materials has not been as rapid as wished. Here I propose that this may be explained by considering the simple view of nonlinear optical phenomena as being determined mostly by the length of interaction time between photons and matter. Tentative routes towards improvements in the efficiency of nonlinear optical phenomena are suggested.
Mechano-Raman spectroscopy is demonstrated by using interlayer phonons of atomic-layer vibrators to drive synchronous motion of the metallic plasmonic structure that can then be detected. The modulated light scattering brings out the information that cannot be accessed by optical Raman spectroscopy.
The turbulent dynamics of a 2D quantum fluid of exciton–polaritons is measured in a planar AlGaAs microcavity after a pulsed optical excitation. Clear evidence of both the onset of vortex clustering and inverse energy cascade is provided.
A nonlinear optical neural network image sensor based on an image intensifier enables efficient all-optical image encoding for a variety of machine-vision tasks.
Researchers demonstrate that the dark saturation current in organic photodiodes is fundamentally limited by mid-gap trap states. This leads to an upper limit for specific detectivity.
Researchers demonstrate sub-picosecond steering of ultrafast incoherent emission from a light-emitting metasurface. The steering is achieved over a 70° range.
3D-RAPID, a scalable computational microscope using 54 cameras, records 3D topographic videos of freely moving organisms over an area of 135 cm2 at a spatial resolution of tens of micrometres and at a throughput exceeding 5 gigapixels per second.
The addition of a strong coupling layer allows polariton-based emission from red and green organic light-emitting diodes with high external quantum efficiency up to 10%, linewidth smaller than 20 nm and angle-independent emission, with spectral shifts smaller than 10 nm over a 60° angular tilt.
Nature Photonics talks to Mark Hahnel, the founder and CEO of Figshare, a popular data repository, about the benefits and trends in making data open and shareable.
Current LiDAR approaches suffer from congestion issues, which affect measurement performance and increased system complexity. Now researchers demonstrate a chaotic microcomb that exhibits congestion-immune naturally orthogonalized light channels.
A quantum key distribution with a key rate of 115.8 Mb s–1 is demonstrated over 10 km standard optical fibre. To this end, a high-speed and stable system, an integrated transmitter for low error modulation and multipixel superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors are developed.
In combination with a 2.5-GHz clocked time-bin quantum key distribution system, secret keys are generated at a rate of 64 Mbps over a distance of 10.0 km and at a rate of 3.0 Mbps over a distance of 102.4 km with real-time key distillation.
X-ray photons emitted by free electrons travelling in van der Waals materials show energy shifts induced by quantum recoil, thus offering a viable route to generating tailored and tunable single X-ray photons.
