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The nineteenth-century Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell made groundbreaking contributions to many areas of science including thermodynamics and colour vision. However, he is best known for his equations that unified electricity, magnetism and light.
Mischaracterization of solar cell power conversion efficiencies and widespread publication of inconsistent data in scientific journals threatens to undermine progress in organic and hybrid photovoltaics research.
Silicon photonics is the optical analogue of silicon microelectronics. It promises to use photons to detect, process and transmit information more efficiently than electrical signals, and yet have low manufacturing costs as a result of using conventional silicon-integrated-circuit processes.
Applying structured illumination microscopy to coherent imaging modalities such as scattering does not yield any additional information beyond that provided by oblique illumination. It thus yields no resolution enhancement over the Abbe diffraction limit, which was derived precisely for that case.
To avoid a 'capacity crunch', future optical networks will need to simultaneously transmit multiple spatial channels. For spatial multiplexing to be practical, the upgrade path from legacy wavelength-division multiplexed systems needs to be smooth and to consider integration-induced crosstalk from the outset.
Even for simple systems, the interpretations of new attosecond measurements are complicated and provide only a glimpse of their potential. Nonetheless, the lasting impact will be the revelation of how short-time dynamics can determine the electronic properties of more complex systems.