Reviews & Analysis

Nanodiamonds that are levitated by light and are equipped with internal spin provide a new platform for performing quantum and optomechanical experiments with massive, environmentally isolated objects.

Perovskite semiconductors have altered the landscape of solar cell research. Now researchers show that these materials may also offer a flexible platform for colour imaging and wavelength-selective sensing.

The opportunities and challenges for wide-scale deployment of silicon photonics in data centres dominated discussion at this year's Group IV Photonics conference in Canada.

This review covers state-of-the-art quantum teleportation technologies, from photonic qubits and optical modes to atomic ensembles, trapped atoms and solid-state systems. Open issues and potential future implementations are also discussed.

Electrically driven antennas are ubiquitous at radio frequencies, but frequency generators cannot reach optical frequencies. Quantum shot noise from inelastic tunnelling may provide the solution.

Methods of nonlinear time series analysis shed new light on the nature and predictability of extreme events.

The discovery of a new nonlinear light propagation regime in optical fibres paves the way to spectrally brighter lasers and control of signal distortion in communication links.

Turning living cells into miniature lasers offers new opportunities for cell labelling, tracking and sensing on a grand scale.

Optical scattering limits the ability to image or focus beneath one millimetre of tissue in biomedical optics. This Review summarizes recently developed 'guidestar' mechanisms that provide feedback for intra-tissue focusing.

Researchers have observed light propagation in which photons glide smoothly along a one-dimensional chain of electrons known as a Luttinger liquid — a many-body interacting quantum system held within a single-walled carbon nanotube.

As the plasmonics community meets in Jerusalem, the hunt to make it a more practical technology continues. The use of new materials and applications in colour printing could be part of the answer.

A state-of-the-art source of hyperentangled photon pairs has been built and its quantum properties fully characterized.

The observation of individual atoms with single-lattice-site resolution has proved to be an enormously powerful detection method for optical lattice-based quantum simulators. Such a technique has now been demonstrated with fermionic atoms.

The ultrafast enhancement of the exchange interaction between two spins in an antiferromagnetic insulator can now be detected, thanks to an all-optical pump–probe method based on stimulated two-magnon excitation.

The benefits of designing and constructing organic solar cells featuring more than a single donor and single acceptor material are discussed.

All-dielectric photonic quasicrystals may act as zero-refractive-index homogeneous materials despite their lack of translational symmetry and periodicity, stretching wavelengths to infinity and offering applications in light wavefront sculpting and optical cloaking.

The finding that a graphene sponge structure can undergo light-driven levitation exposes both fundamentally interesting physics and thought-provoking potential for next-generation space propulsion.