Lasers, LEDs and light sources articles within Nature Physics

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  • Research Briefing |

    The concept of temporal mode-locking has been leveraged to study the interplay between laser mode-locking and photonic lattices that exhibit non-Hermitian topological phenomena. The results suggest new opportunities to study nonlinear and non-Hermitian topological physics as well as potential applications to sensing, optical computing and frequency-comb design.

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Coulomb interactions in free-electron beams are usually seen as an adverse effect. The creation of distinctive number states with one, two, three and four electrons now reveals unexpected opportunities for electron microscopy and lithography from Coulomb correlations.

    • Rudolf Haindl
    • , Armin Feist
    •  & Claus Ropers

  • Editorial |

    Exacerbated by the impacts of climate change and the recent energy crisis, concentrated efforts towards more sustainable research have become matters of urgency, in particular for large-scale accelerator complexes and light sources.

  • News & Views |

    Laser light is usually limited to the same wavelength range as the spontaneous emission of the active material. A judicious choice of dielectric coatings on the cavity has now enabled laser emission far beyond the spectral range of the gain medium.

    • Alessandra Toncelli

  • Letter |

    As laser action emerges from fluorescence, its emission wavelength lies within the fluorescence spectrum. Exploiting multiphonon processes can take the laser emission far beyond the spectral limits defined by a material’s intrinsic fluorescence.

    • Fei Liang
    • , Cheng He
    •  & Yan-Feng Chen

  • News & Views |

    Colloidal random lasers are hard to design and control. Combining optically controlled micro-heaters with thermophilic particles attracted by them leads to microlasers with programmable and reversible patterns.

    • Neda Ghofraniha

  • Article |

    Experiments inspired by the behaviour of active matter show that an external optical stimulus can spatially reconfigure colloidal random lasers and continuously tune their lasing threshold.

    • Manish Trivedi
    • , Dhruv Saxena
    •  & Giorgio Volpe

  • News & Views |

    Nonlinear optical effects are by default weak but they can be enhanced by sculpting the resulting spectrally periodic pulses from a fibre laser into an optimal shape.

    • Thibaut Sylvestre

  • Article |

    Self-referenced attosecond streaking enables in situ measurements of Auger emission in atomic neon excited by femtosecond pulses from an X-ray free-electron laser with subfemtosecond time resolution and despite the jitter inherent to X-ray free-electron lasers.

    • D. C. Haynes
    • , M. Wurzer
    •  & A. L. Cavalieri

  • Letter |

    The coherence of a close-to-ideal laser beam can be quadratically better than what was believed to be the quantum limit. This new Heisenberg limit could be attained with circuit quantum electrodynamics.

    • Travis J. Baker
    • , Seyed N. Saadatmand
    •  & Howard M. Wiseman

  • Article |

    Inertial dynamics are observed in a ferromagnet. Specifically, a nutation is seen on top of the usual spin precession that has a lifetime on the order of 10 picoseconds.

    • Kumar Neeraj
    • , Nilesh Awari
    •  & Stefano Bonetti

  • News & Views |

    Quantum cascade lasers are bright and compact semiconductor lasers that emit light in the mid- to far-infrared spectral region. The use of a closed ring cavity has now set them on the path towards ultrafast pulses.

    • Johann Riemensberger

  • News & Views |

    Despite the wide use of mode-locked lasers, no general theory for mode-locking exists. An attractor dissection approach provides some intuitive understanding of the complex dynamics in one type of mode-locking.

    • F. Ömer Ilday

  • Article |

    The electron dynamics of single-layer Bi2Sr2−xLaxCuO6+δ is studied as a function of doping, revealing the evolution of charge-transfer excitations from incoherent and localized (as in a Mott insulator) to coherent and delocalized (as in a conventional metal).

    • S. Peli
    • , S. Dal Conte
    •  & C. Giannetti

  • News & Views |

    Plasmons offer the tantalizing prospect of accelerated light–matter interactions. Accelerated dynamics has now been observed in a hybrid plasmonic laser or spaser, capable of producing pulses on ultrafast timescales.

    • Mark Stockman

  • Article |

    Electron scattering limits the optical excitations produced by metal-based lasers to femtosecond timescales. But sub-picosecond pulsing can be achieved in a plasmonic nanowire laser by operating near the surface plasmon frequency.

    • Themistoklis P. H. Sidiropoulos
    • , Robert Röder
    •  & Rupert F. Oulton

  • Letter |

    Random lasers generate the optical feedback required for stimulated emission by scattering light from disordered particles. Their inherent randomness, however, makes controlling the emission wavelength difficult. It is now shown that this problem can be remedied by carefully matching the pump laser to the specific random medium. The concept is applied to a one-dimensional optofluidic device, but could also be applicable to other random lasers.

    • Nicolas Bachelard
    • , Sylvain Gigan
    •  & Patrick Sebbah

  • News & Views |

    A combination of two Nobel ideas circumvents the trade-off between power and accuracy in ultraviolet spectroscopy.

    • Scott A. Diddams

  • Letter |

    Frequency combs provide a broad series of well-calibrated spectral lines for highly precise metrology and spectroscopy, but this usually involves a trade-off between power and accuracy. A comb created by adjusting the time delay between two optical pulses now enables both. This so-called Ramsey comb could probe fundamental problems such as determining the size of the proton.

    • Jonas Morgenweg
    • , Itan Barmes
    •  & Kjeld S. E. Eikema

  • News & Views |

    Femtosecond pulses from X-ray free-electron lasers offer a powerful method for studying charged collective excitations in materials, and provide a potential route to identifying bosonic quasiparticles in condensed-matter systems.

    • Peter Abbamonte

  • Letter |

    Femtosecond pulses from X-ray free-electron lasers offer a powerful method for observing the coherent dynamic of phonons in crystalline materials, it is now shown. This time-resolved spectroscopic tool could provide insight into low-energy collective excitations in solids and how they interact at a microscopic level to determine the material’s macroscopic properties.

    • M. Trigo
    • , M. Fuchs
    •  & D. A. Reis

  • News & Views |

    A relativistic electron beam travelling on an undulating path interacts with a laser and emits light carrying orbital angular momentum. The wavelengths of these bright twisted-light beams can go down to those of hard X-rays.

    • Marie-Emmanuelle Couprie

  • Letter |

    The interaction between light and a relativistic electron beam can be used to generate optical vortices in a free electron laser, providing a way to engineer bright orbital angular momentum light at shorter X-ray wavelengths.

    • Erik Hemsing
    • , Andrey Knyazik
    •  & James B. Rosenzweig

  • News & Views |

    Usually a laser consists of a light-amplifying medium nested between two mirrors. A mirrorless laser that operates by forcing the light to take a long, random path through the gain medium has now been demonstrated.

    • Vladan Vuletic

  • Letter |

    Random lasing, where light is amplified through multiple scattering in a gain medium, could occur naturally in astrophysical environments. Experimental evidence for random lasing in a cloud of cold atoms may lead to a better understanding of these astrophysical lasers.

    • Q. Baudouin
    • , N. Mercadier
    •  & R. Kaiser

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