Optical materials and structures articles within Nature Physics

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  • News & Views |

    Electrons moving in a one-dimensional crystal can acquire a geometrical phase. Sound waves in phononic crystals are now shown to display the same effect — underlining the similarity between conventional solids and acoustic metamaterials.

    • Julio T. Barreiro

  • News & Views |

    Photonic crystals can control the flow of light but they are extremely sensitive to structural disorder. Although this often degrades performance, disorder can actually be used to enhance light collimation.

    • Jorge Bravo-Abad

  • Article |

    By exploiting the interaction between light and phonons in a silica microsphere resonator it is possible to generate Brillouin scattering induced transparency, which is akin to electromagnetically induced transparency but for acoustic waves.

    • JunHwan Kim
    • , Mark C. Kuzyk
    •  & Gaurav Bahl

  • News & Views |

    Transferring electrons from the ground state to an excited state by optical pumping usually increases the population of the upper state. But for graphene in an external magnetic field, the pumped state actually gets depleted.

    • Isabella Gierz

  • Article |

    Landau levels in graphene are not equidistant so that transitions between them can be individually probed. Time-resolved optical pumping experiments reveal strong electron–electron scattering resulting in an Auger-depleted zeroth order Landau level.

    • Martin Mittendorff
    • , Florian Wendler
    •  & Stephan Winnerl

  • News & Views |

    Without a well-defined cavity, there is no obvious way to control the resonant modes in a random laser. Experiments now show that shaping the optical pump allows for controlled single-mode operation at predetermined lasing wavelengths.

    • Stefan Rotter

  • News & Views |

    An unusual form of symmetry breaking in coupled microresonators with balanced optical gain and loss is now exploited to realize a novel type of optical isolator.

    • Chong Yidong

  • Article |

    It is now shown that coupled optical microcavities bear all the hallmarks of parity–time symmetry; that is, the system’s dynamics are unchanged by both time-reversal and mirror transformations. The resonant nature of microcavities results in unusual effects not seen in previous photonic analogues of parity–time-symmetric systems: for example, light travelling in one direction is resonantly enhanced but there are no resonance peaks going the other way.

    • Bo Peng
    • , Şahin Kaya Özdemir
    •  & Lan Yang

  • News & Views |

    Defects in the crystal lattice of silicon carbide prove to be a useful room-temperature source of non-classical light.

    • Igor Aharonovich
    •  & Milos Toth

  • Article |

    Defects in silicon carbide can produce continuous-wave microwaves at room temperature. Spectroscopic analysis indicates a photoinduced inversion of the population in the spin ground states, which makes the defects a potential route to stimulated amplification of microwave radiation.

    • H. Kraus
    • , V. A. Soltamov
    •  & G. V. Astakhov

  • Article |

    A room-temperature motion sensor with record sensitivity is created using a levitating silica nanoparticle. Feedback cooling to reduce the noise arising from Brownian motion enables a detector that is perhaps even sensitive enough to detect non-Newtonian gravity-like forces.

    • Jan Gieseler
    • , Lukas Novotny
    •  & Romain Quidant

  • Letter |

    The intensity of optically-pumped fluorescence generated from a single atomic defect in diamond can be reduced by 80% in just 100 ns by applying infrared laser light. This result demonstrates the possibility of using these so-called nitrogen–vacancy centres to create optical switches that operate at room temperature.

    • Michael Geiselmann
    • , Renaud Marty
    •  & Romain Quidant

  • News & Views |

    Distinguishing between different sources of noise in quantum dots could help to develop single-photon devices that are suitable for long-range entanglement.

    • Hendrik Bluhm

  • Article |

    Charge noise and spin noise lead to decoherence of the state of a quantum dot. A fast spectroscopic technique based on resonance fluorescence can distinguish between these two deleterious effects, enabling a better understanding of how to minimize their influence.

    • Andreas V. Kuhlmann
    • , Julien Houel
    •  & Richard J. Warburton

  • News & Views |

    Transformation optics is an invaluable tool for designing metamaterials. The same idea, it is now shown, could also prove to be a boon for nanoplasmonics.

    • R. C. McPhedran

  • Article |

    The modelling of plasmonic systems is complicated by the broad range of length scales involved: the physical dimensions of the structure might be as small as 1 nm, whereas the wavelength of the light involved can be a few hundred nanometres. It is now shown that transformation optics, a technique successfully used to design metamaterials, is also valuable for circumventing these problems.

    • J. B. Pendry
    • , A. I. Fernández-Domínguez
    •  & Rongkuo Zhao

  • News & Views |

    A planar composite material images ultraviolet light like a lens, by unwinding its phase. The concept could aid high-resolution nanolithography.

    • Rupert F. Oulton
    •  & John B. Pendry

  • News & Views |

    In quantum control there is an inherent tension between high fidelity requirements and the need for speed to avoid decoherence. A direct comparison of quantum control protocols at these two extremes indicates where the sweet spot may lie.

    • Lloyd C. L. Hollenberg

  • News & Views |

    Brillouin scattering of light is now shown to attenuate the Brownian motion of microscopic acoustic resonators. This electrostrictive phenomenon could be a useful complement to the ponderomotive and photothermal effects that can optically control optomechanical systems.

    • Ivan Favero

  • Letter |

    A novel mechanism for cooling tiny mechanical resonators is now demonstrated. Inelastic scattering of light from phonons in an electrostrictive material attenuates the Brownian motion of the mechanical mode.

    • Gaurav Bahl
    • , Matthew Tomes
    •  & Tal Carmon

  • Article |

    A novel mechanism for cooling nanomechanical objects has now been demonstrated. Optically excited electron–hole pairs produce a mechanical stress that damps the motion of a gallium arsenide membrane. In this way, the nanoscale resonator is cooled from room temperature to 4 K.

    • K. Usami
    • , A. Naesby
    •  & E. S. Polzik

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