Optical physics articles within Nature

Featured

  • Article |

    Branched flow of light is experimentally observed inside a thin soap membrane, where smooth variations of the membrane thickness transform the light beam into branched filaments of enhanced intensity that keep dividing as the waves propagate.

    • Anatoly Patsyk
    • , Uri Sivan
    •  & Miguel A. Bandres

  • Article |

    Laser-generated high-harmonic emission is used to image the valence potential and electron density in magnesium fluoride and calcium fluoride at the picometre scale, enabling direct probing of material properties.

    • H. Lakhotia
    • , H. Y. Kim
    •  & E. Goulielmakis

  • Article |

    Wave destabilization is demonstrated in semiconductor ring lasers operating at low pumping levels, where ultrafast gain recovery leads to the emergence of a frequency comb regime owing to phase turbulence.

    • Marco Piccardo
    • , Benedikt Schwarz
    •  & Federico Capasso

  • Article |

    The coupling between light and relativistic free electrons is enhanced through phase matching of electrons with optical whispering-gallery modes in dielectric microspheres and through extended modal lifetimes.

    • Ofer Kfir
    • , Hugo Lourenço-Martins
    •  & Claus Ropers

  • Article |

    The strong interaction of coherent free electrons with a photonic-crystal cavity enables the measurement of the lifetimes of the cavity modes and provides a technique for multidimensional near-field imaging and spectroscopy.

    • Kangpeng Wang
    • , Raphael Dahan
    •  & Ido Kaminer

  • Article |

    Pairs of photons in the Laughlin state are created by mimicking a fractional quantum Hall system using the synthetic magnetic field induced by a twisted optical cavity and Rydberg-mediated polariton interactions.

    • Logan W. Clark
    • , Nathan Schine
    •  & Jonathan Simon

  • Article |

    Conventionally, heat transfer occurs by conduction, convection or radiation, but has also been theoretically predicted to occur through quantum fluctuations across a vacuum; this prediction has now been confirmed experimentally.

    • King Yan Fong
    • , Hao-Kun Li
    •  & Xiang Zhang

  • Article |

    precisely controllable integrated optical gyroscope based on stimulated Brillouin scattering is used to study non-Hermitian physics, revealing a four-fold enhancement of the Sagnac scale factor near exceptional points.

    • Yu-Hung Lai
    • , Yu-Kun Lu
    •  & Kerry Vahala

  • Letter |

    Excitation to the second excited state of 229Th is used to populate the metastable state 229mTh, enabling accurate determination of the isomer’s energy, half-life and excitation linewidth.

    • Takahiko Masuda
    • , Akihiro Yoshimi
    •  & Koji Yoshimura

  • Letter |

    Multi-qubit entangling gates are realized by simultaneously driving multiple motional modes of a linear chain of trapped ions with modulated external fields, achieving a fidelity of about 93 per cent with four qubits.

    • Yao Lu
    • , Shuaining Zhang
    •  & Kihwan Kim

  • Letter |

    Nonlinear optical measurements in a two-dimensional electron system embedded in an optical cavity show enhanced polariton–polariton interactions in the fractional quantum Hall regime.

    • Patrick Knüppel
    • , Sylvain Ravets
    •  & Atac Imamoglu

  • Letter |

    Frequency modulation is used to create ‘Floquet polaritons’—strongly interacting quasi-particles that exist in a customizable set of modes.

    • Logan W. Clark
    • , Ningyuan Jia
    •  & Jonathan Simon

  • Letter |

    The magnetic properties of a ferromagnetic layer stack are controlled on attosecond timescales through optically induced spin and orbital momentum transfer, demonstrating a coherent regime of ultrafast magnetism.

    • Florian Siegrist
    • , Julia A. Gessner
    •  & Martin Schultze

  • Letter |

    A low-power, fixed microwave signal in combination with an optical-pump signal generates an optical frequency comb that spans the whole wavelength range of the telecommunications C-band, with possible applications ranging from spectroscopy to optical communications.

    • Alfredo Rueda
    • , Florian Sedlmeir
    •  & Harald G. L. Schwefel

  • Letter |

    Electro-optic detection in a nonlinear crystal is used to measure coherence properties of vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field and deduce the spectrum of the ground state of electromagnetic radiation.

    • Ileana-Cristina Benea-Chelmus
    • , Francesca Fabiana Settembrini
    •  & Jérôme Faist

  • Letter |

    Room-temperature modulation frequencies exceeding 200 GHz are demonstrated in birefringent semiconductor spin-lasers by coupling the spin of the charge carriers to the light polarization.

    • Markus Lindemann
    • , Gaofeng Xu
    •  & Nils C. Gerhardt

  • Letter |

    A spatially oscillating two-dimensional waveguide array is used to realize a photonic topological insulator in synthetic dimensions with modal-space edge states, unidirectionality and robust topological protection.

    • Eran Lustig
    • , Steffen Weimann
    •  & Mordechai Segev

  • Letter |

    Waveguide quantum electrodynamics is used to couple a single collective excitation of an atomic array to a nanoscale waveguide; the excitation is stored and later read out, generating guided single photons on demand.

    • Neil V. Corzo
    • , Jérémy Raskop
    •  & Julien Laurat

  • Letter |

    Femtosecond time-resolved X-ray diffraction reveals that in the ultrafast demagnitization of ferromagnetic iron, about 80% of the angular momentum lost from the spins is transferred to the lattice on a sub-picosecond timescale.

    • C. Dornes
    • , Y. Acremann
    •  & S. L. Johnson

  • Letter |

    Terahertz light pulses induce transitions between a topological and a trivial phase in the Weyl semimetal WTe2 through an interlayer shear strain.

    • Edbert J. Sie
    • , Clara M. Nyby
    •  & Aaron M. Lindenberg

  • Letter |

    The theoretically predicted Casimir torque, which causes charge-neutral, birefringent materials to rotate towards a preferred alignment, is measured.

    • David A. T. Somers
    • , Joseph L. Garrett
    •  & Jeremy N. Munday

  • Letter |

    A refractive lens and a refractive prism for extreme-ultraviolet radiation have been developed that use the deflection of the radiation in an inhomogeneous jet of atoms.

    • L. Drescher
    • , O. Kornilov
    •  & B. Schütte

  • Letter |

    Improved techniques allow the measurement of a frequency difference with an uncertainty of the order of 10–19 between two independent atomic optical lattice clocks, suggesting that they may be able to improve state-of-the-art geodetic techniques.

    • W. F. McGrew
    • , X. Zhang
    •  & A. D. Ludlow

  • Letter |

    Cooperative quantum effects in superlattices of quantum dots made of caesium lead halide perovskite give rise to superfluorescence, with the individual emitters interacting coherently to give intense bursts of light.

    • Gabriele Rainò
    • , Michael A. Becker
    •  & Thilo Stöferle

  • Letter |

    Integrating an optical Kerr frequency comb source with an electronically excited laser pump produces a battery-powered comb generator that does not require external lasers, moveable optics or laboratory set-ups.

    • Brian Stern
    • , Xingchen Ji
    •  & Michal Lipson

  • Letter |

    A part-light, part-matter exciton-polariton topological insulator is created in an array of semiconductor microcavities.

    • S. Klembt
    • , T. H. Harder
    •  & S. Höfling

  • Letter |

    Genuine, unpredictable quantum random-number generation that is provably secure against quantum and classical adversaries is demonstrated, certified by the loophole-free violation of a Bell inequality.

    • Yang Liu
    • , Qi Zhao
    •  & Jian-Wei Pan

  • Letter |

    Topologically protected edge states realized in a square array of ring resonators are used to demonstrate a robust source of heralded single photons produced by spontaneous four-wave mixing.

    • Sunil Mittal
    • , Elizabeth A. Goldschmidt
    •  & Mohammad Hafezi

  • 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

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