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Room-temperature single-photon emission at several wavelengths in the near-infrared, including the telecom window, is realized by organic colour centres chemically implanted on chirality-defined single-walled carbon nanotubes.
The generation and manipulation of cavity solitons in microresonators is creating new opportunities for Kerr combs to aid applications such as optical communications and spectroscopy.
The realization of satellite-to-ground quantum cryptography would make quantum-secured communications possible on a global scale. Four recent breakthroughs suggest that this compelling capability could be achieved by the end of this decade.
Ultrathin, versatile, integrated optical devices and high-speed optical information processing could be the upcoming real-world opportunities of plasmonic metasurfaces.
Spin–valley coupling in transition metal dichalcogenides has been shown to persist at room temperature when excitons are coherently coupled to cavity photons.
Significant improvements in the loss and drive voltage of silicon photonics-based optical phase modulators look set to benefit both short-reach and long-distance data communications.
An external 'tuning knob' by means of applying a transverse electric field has been experimentally demonstrated to modify the bandgap of black phosphorus, making the two-dimensional material practical for integration in functional nanodevices.
Two concurrent demonstrations of programmable photonic processors based on large meshes of interconnected waveguides on a silicon chip provide new hope for optical information processing.
Reports of photon–photon interaction experiments, novel imaging schemes and state-of-the-art mirrors were highlights of the recent International Conference on X-ray Optics and Applications in Yokohama, Japan.
The direct measurement of few-cycle optical waveforms with arbitrary polarization and weak intensity is now made possible thanks to extreme ultraviolet interferometry with isolated attosecond pulses.
New theoretical analysis predicts that the introduction of a carefully designed gain and loss profile into a scattering medium could enable the unperturbed flow of light with constant, uniform intensity.
High-speed control of polarization may lead to ultrafast modulators and help explore polarization-dependent ultrafast dynamics in matter. Now, femtosecond polarization switching is realized through intraband optical excitation in an ultrathin semiconductor layer.
The demonstration of a quantum dot-sensitized graphene image sensor that offers a very broad spectral response and that is integrated with silicon CMOS technology could potentially be a new cost-effective chip platform for hyperspectral imaging and spectroscopy.
Hyperbolic metamaterials are shown to enable the emission of Cherenkov radiation from low-energy charged particles travelling at slow speeds. The achievement could lead to new forms of light sources and detectors.
