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Optical materials and structures are substances used to manipulate the flow of light. This can include reflecting, absorbing, focusing or splitting an optical beam. The efficiency of a specific material at each task is strongly wavelength dependent, thus a full understanding of the interaction between light and matter is vital.
Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors require operation at T < 4 K, and successful attempts to extend their operation at 20 K and above using high-TC BSCCO flakes come at the cost of lower scalability to large areas. Here, the authors break this trade-off by using high-quality MgB2 films and exploiting a helium-ion beam-based irradiation process.
Illustration of entangled photon pair generation in an integrated silicon carbide (SiC) platform. This achievement, coupled with SiC’s potential to integrate various electrical, photonic and quantum technologies in the same device platform, offers promises for the scalable implementation of quantum information processing.
The authors present nonvolatile optical phase shift induced by ferroelectric hafnium zirconium oxide deposited on a SiN waveguide. This finding paves the way for largescale programmable photonic circuits for communication, computing, and sensing.
Achieving acoustic waveguides with low loss, tailorability, and easy fabrication is a considerable challenge. Here, the authors introduce suspended anti-resonant acoustic waveguides with superior confinement and high selectivity of acoustic modes, supporting both forward and backward SBS on chip.
Properly maintaining the skin temperature is critical for wound healing, especially outdoors. Now, a lightweight and skin-friendly wound dressing is reported that can continuously cool the skin without energy input.