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Due to dispersion, the group velocity of laser pulses propagating in plasmas slows down with increasing wavelength, which presents challenges for precision-controlled plasma interactions. Now, new techniques for spatio-temporal pulse shaping have lifted this limitation in the demonstration of short-pulse table-top soft X-ray lasers.
The Ti:Sa laser, a workhorse of any optics laboratory, is typically a bench-top system. A hybrid integration approach now enables a low-threshold photonic-circuit-integrated Ti:Sa laser the size of a fingernail.
A photothermal microscopy technique overcomes the diffraction limit by exploiting the spatiotemporal dynamics of heat dissipation within the imaging volume, offering new opportunities for super-resolution, bond-selective and label-free imaging of biological targets.
X-ray photons emitted by free electrons travelling in van der Waals materials show energy shifts induced by quantum recoil, thus offering a viable route to generating tailored and tunable single X-ray photons.
A field trial in the Swiss mountains demonstrating that an intense laser beam can guide lightning discharge over tens of metres gives hope for the development of a new form of mobile lightning protection.
A scheme for converting qubits between two different representations, discrete and continuous variables, paves the way for more-efficient quantum networks.
The near-field chirality of a single-symmetry achiral object enables polarization-dependent unidirectional photocurrent generation, and the vectorial output paves a way for a new family of geometric photodetectors.
The resonance wavelengths of optical Möbius strip microcavities can be continuously tuned via geometric phase manipulation by changing the thickness-to-width ratio of the strip.
Robotic and other devices often demand ever more compact and sophisticated sensors. This Review assesses the opportunities for metasurfaces to provide optical functionality solutions for such applications.
Nonlocal effects—in which the optical response of a system at a given spatial point depends on the field in the surrounding space—are reviewed in the context of metasurfaces and flat optics. Nonlocal flat optics may be useful for controlling light in ultra-thin platforms.
Recent developments in reconfigurable metasurfaces are reviewed with a focus on case studies that are promising for commercialization and associated challenges.
Using two different designs of superconductor-based detectors, two independent research groups report photon number detection for light pulses with up to 100 photons.
Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors offer outstanding performance, but the development of large-format imaging arrays is challenging. A new approach based on sectioning a single nanowire enables an eightfold improvement of the spatial resolution and the realization of a 1,024-pixel imager.
