Optical materials and structures articles within Nature

Featured

  • Review Article |

    Subwavelength-grating metamaterial structures, their main operation principles and their implementation in integrated photonic devices are reviewed.

    • Pavel Cheben
    • , Robert Halir
    •  & David R. Smith

  • Letter |

    All-inorganic perovskite nanocrystals containing caesium and lead provide low-cost, flexible and solution-processable scintillators that are highly sensitive to X-ray irradiation and emit radioluminescence that is colour-tunable across the visible spectrum.

    • Qiushui Chen
    • , Jing Wu
    •  & Xiaogang Liu

  • Letter |

    Ohmic losses in plasmonic devices can be reduced by exploiting ‘resonant switching’, in which light couples to surface plasmon polaritons only when in resonance and bypasses them otherwise.

    • Christian Haffner
    • , Daniel Chelladurai
    •  & Juerg Leuthold

  • Letter |

    The lowest-energy exciton state in caesium lead halide perovskite nanocrystals is shown to be a bright triplet state, contrary to expectations that lowest-energy excitons should always be dark.

    • Michael A. Becker
    • , Roman Vaxenburg
    •  & Alexander L. Efros

  • Letter |

    A photovoltage field-effect transistor is demonstrated that is very sensitive to infrared light and has high gain.

    • Valerio Adinolfi
    •  & Edward H. Sargent

  • Letter |

    It is an long-standing goal to produce a photonic quantum Hall effect, analogous to the well-known quantum Hall effect for electrons; now an artificial magnetic field for a continuum of photons has been produced, making it possible to observe photonic Landau levels in a photonic quantum Hall material.

    • Nathan Schine
    • , Albert Ryou
    •  & Jonathan Simon

  • Letter |

    Chiral nematic liquid crystals are self-organized helical superstructures in which the helices can stand or lie, and lie in either a uniform or a random way; here, the helices are reversibly driven from a standing arrangement to a uniform lying arrangement and then rotated in-plane—solely by light.

    • Zhi-gang Zheng
    • , Yannian Li
    •  & Quan Li

  • Letter |

    An electronic–photonic microprocessor chip manufactured using a conventional microelectronics foundry process is demonstrated; the chip contains 70 million transistors and 850 photonic components and directly uses light to communicate to other chips.

    • Chen Sun
    • , Mark T. Wade
    •  & Vladimir M. Stojanović

  • Letter |

    Exceptional points are singularities in non-Hermitian systems that can produce unusual effects, and it is shown that a Dirac cone in a photonic crystal can generate a continuous ring of exceptional points through flattening the tip of the cone.

    • Bo Zhen
    • , Chia Wei Hsu
    •  & Marin Soljačić

  • Letter |

    A negative refractive index, a property that does not exist in natural materials, can be produced in so-called metamaterials by combining two building blocks; here it is shown that it is possible to design and fabricate a metamaterial with a negative refractive index that consists of only one type of building block by taking advantage of its crystalline structure, and this approach is demonstrated through an acoustic superlens.

    • Nadège Kaina
    • , Fabrice Lemoult
    •  & Geoffroy Lerosey

  • Letter |

    Organohalide perovskites and preformed colloidal quantum dots are combined in the solution phase to produce epitaxially aligned ‘dots-in-a-matrix’ crystals that have both the excellent electrical transport properties of the perovskite matrix and the high radiative efficiency of the quantum dots.

    • Zhijun Ning
    • , Xiwen Gong
    •  & Edward H. Sargent

  • Letter |

    Visible-frequency hyperbolic metasurfaces defined on single-crystal silver exhibit negative refraction and diffraction-free propagation, as well as strong, dispersion-dependent spin–orbit coupling for propagating surface plasmon polaritons, with device performance greatly exceeding those of previous bulk metamaterial demonstrations.

    • Alexander A. High
    • , Robert C. Devlin
    •  & Hongkun Park

  • Letter |

    Here stable colour changes induced by solid-state electrical switching of ultrathin films of a germanium–antimony–telluride alloy are demonstrated, adding to its established uses in data storage; possible applications include flexible and transparent displays.

    • Peiman Hosseini
    • , C. David Wright
    •  & Harish Bhaskaran

  • Letter |

    Multiple-quantum-well semiconductors can provide one of the largest known nonlinear material responses, which is, however, geometrically limited to light beams polarized perpendicular to the semiconductor layers; by coupling a plasmonic metasurface to the semiconductor heterostructure, this limitation can be lifted, opening a new path towards ultrathin planarized components with large nonlinear response.

    • Jongwon Lee
    • , Mykhailo Tymchenko
    •  & Mikhail A. Belkin

  • Letter |

    Theoretical and experimental studies reveal that light can be confined within a planar dielectric photonic crystal slab even though the frequency of this optical bound state is inside the continuous spectrum of extended states from the same symmetry group.

    • Chia Wei Hsu
    • , Bo Zhen
    •  & Marin Soljačić

  • Letter |

    A continuous-wave Raman silicon laser with a photonic-crystal nanocavity less than ten micrometres in size and an unprecedentedly low lasing threshold of one microwatt is demonstrated, showing that the integration of all-silicon devices into photonic circuits may be possible.

    • Yasushi Takahashi
    • , Yoshitaka Inui
    •  & Susumu Noda

  • Letter |

    The ‘time cloak’ experiment is extended here using a time analogue of the Talbot effect in optics — in which a plane wave incident on a diffraction grating produces repeated images of the grating at regular distances — to show that almost half of the time axis can be concealed.

    • Joseph M. Lukens
    • , Daniel E. Leaird
    •  & Andrew M. Weiner

  • Letter |

    A metamaterial is fabricated that yields a ‘left-handed’ response — characterized by a negative refractive index — to ultraviolet light incident at all angles, allowing both passive and active flat lensing of arbitrarily shaped, two-dimensional objects beyond the near field in free space.

    • Ting Xu
    • , Amit Agrawal
    •  & Henri J. Lezec

  • Letter |

    Net laser cooling from 290 kelvin to about 250 kelvin is achieved in semiconductor cadmium sulphide ‘nanobelts’ and attributed to strong coupling between excitons and longitudinal optical phonons.

    • Jun Zhang
    • , Dehui Li
    •  & Qihua Xiong

  • Letter |

    A large-scale silicon nanophotonic phased array with more than 4,000 antennas is demonstrated using a state-of-the-art complementary metal-oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) process, enabling arbitrary holograms with tunability, which brings phased arrays to many new technological territories.

    • Jie Sun
    • , Erman Timurdogan
    •  & Michael R. Watts

  • News & Views |

    Entanglement between a photon and a stationary particle is a key resource for quantum communication. The effect has now been observed for a photon and a single electron spin in a semiconductor nanostructure. See Letters p.421 & p.426

    • Sophia E. Economou

  • Letter |

    Two gold nanostructures with controllable subnanometre separation are used to follow the evolution of plasmonic modes; the distance at which quantum tunnelling sets in is determined, and a quantum limit for plasmonic field confinement is estimated.

    • Kevin J. Savage
    • , Matthew M. Hawkeye
    •  & Jeremy J. Baumberg

  • Letter |

    An extremely large, negative refractive index is produced in a two-dimensional electron gas by exploiting its kinetic inductance, which is a manifestation of acceleration of the electrons by electromagnetic fields.

    • Hosang Yoon
    • , Kitty Y. M. Yeung
    •  & Donhee Ham

  • Outlook |

    Transparency across the spectrum combined with electronic prowess makes graphene an ideal photonic material.

    • Neil Savage

  • News |

    'Optical diode' could help make commercial photonic chips a reality.

    • Zeeya Merali

  • Letter |

    A promising approach to realizing a practical quantum bit scheme is the optical control of single electron spins in quantum dots. The reliable preparation and manipulation of the quantum states of such spins have been demonstrated recently. The final challenge is to carry out single-shot measurements of the electron spin without interfering with it. A technique has now been developed that enables such measurement, by coupling one quantum dot to another to produce a quantum dot molecule.

    • A. N. Vamivakas
    • , C.-Y. Lu
    •  & M. Atatüre

Browse broader subjects

Browse narrower subjects

Browse Optical materials and structures across other nature.com journals