Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
The counterpart of superradiance, called superabsorption, has now been observed. Superabsorption rates are much higher than that of ordinary absorption and may enable weak-signal exploitation.
Two quantum repeater segments are connected via on-demand entanglement swapping by using two atomic quantum memories. The efficiency improves from a quadratic scaling to a linear one with the preparation efficiency of the atom–photon entanglement.
The use of a non-unitary metasurface enables a new degree of freedom, allowing for dynamical and continuous control over the output quantum state and the effective quantum interaction of two single photons at will.
Using CMOS-ready ultra-high-Q microresonators, a highly coherent electrically pumped integrated laser with frequency noise of 0.2 Hz2 Hz−1, corresponding to a short-term linewidth of 1.2 Hz, is demonstrated. The device configuration is also found to relieve the dispersion requirements for microcomb generation that have limited certain nonlinear platforms.
An intensity-based holographic imaging via space-domain Kramers–Kronig relations is presented, allowing the phase image of an object to be obtained directly from a single intensity measurement with oblique illumination.
Using a metasurface that allows shaping of the polarization state of a light beam independently at each point of space along its propagation direction, longitudinally variable polarization optical components are demonstrated, inspiring new directions in structured light, polarization-switchable devices and light–matter interaction.
Through a dense krypton gas jet in the presence of a broadband near-infrared pulse, spectral compression of broadband XUV radiation between 145 and 130 nm wavelengths into a narrow-bandwidth XUV pulse at 100.3 nm wavelength by four-wave mixing is demonstrated.
Plasmonics and metamaterials enable ptychographic coherent diffractive imaging with improved reconstructed phase and amplitude. The approach may be particularly useful for imaging of extremely thin or highly transparent objects.
When a laser is tuned across a split energy level, photonic diatomic molecules in two linearly coupled microresonators support the formation of self-enforcing solitary waves, featuring coherent, tunable and reproducible microcombs with up to ten times higher net conversion efficiency than the state of the art.
Adapting the amplitude-modulated light detection and ranging approach to super-resolution microscopy offers a typical axial localization precision of 6.8 nm over the entire field of view and the axial capture range, enabling imaging of biological samples by up to several micrometres in depth.