Optics and photonics articles within Nature Physics

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  • News & Views |

    Levitated nanoparticles can now be cooled to the motional ground state in two dimensions. This advance could enable a new generation of macroscopic quantum experiments.

    • Dalziel J. Wilson

  • News & Views |

    Time-varying photonics constitutes an emerging concept where a material’s time-dependence is used to achieve novel functionalities. A temporal double-slit-diffraction experiment demonstrates the feasibility of time-modulating materials to control light.

    • Francisco J. Rodríguez-Fortuño

  • Article |

    The scalability of quantum information processing applications is generally hindered by loss and inefficient preparation and detection. A minimal loss network based on phonons has now been realized with trapped ions.

    • Wentao Chen
    • , Yao Lu
    •  & Kihwan Kim

  • News & Views |

    A new variation on cathodoluminescence provides a view of a sample’s optical response with time resolution shorter than an optical cycle.

    • Catherine Kealhofer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ultrafast photon–electron spectroscopy commonly requires a driving laser. Now, an inverse approach based on cathodoluminescence spectroscopy has allowed a compact solution to spectral interferometry inside an electron microscope, without a laser.

    • Masoud Taleb
    • , Mario Hentschel
    •  & Nahid Talebi

  • Research Briefing |

    Coherent multidimensional spectroscopy with nanoscale spatial resolution was used to directly probe a plasmon polariton quantum wave packet. To reproduce these results an improved quantum model of photoemission was required, in which the coherent coupling between plasmons and electrons is accounted for with the plasmon excitations extending beyond a two-level model.

  • Letter |

    Plasmonics allows precise engineering of light–matter interactions and is the driver behind many optical devices. The local observation of a plasmonic quantum wave packet is a step towards bringing these functionalities to the quantum regime.

    • Sebastian Pres
    • , Bernhard Huber
    •  & Tobias Brixner

  • Article |

    Dynamic and disordered media destroy the correlations that underlie many quantum measurement protocols and applications. However, coherently backscattered photons can remain partially correlated due to interference between scattering trajectories.

    • Mamoon Safadi
    • , Ohad Lib
    •  & Yaron Bromberg

  • News & Views |

    Long-theorized, non-dispersive de Broglie wave packets have been optically synthesized using classically entangled ring-shaped space-time wave packets in a medium exhibiting anomalous dispersion.

    • Mbaye Diouf
    • , Joshua A. Burrow
    •  & Kimani C. Toussaint Jr.

  • Article |

    de Broglie–Mackinnon wave packets are an extension of matter waves, but have so far remained a theoretical construct. Combining spatio-temporal light fields with anomalous dispersion has now allowed their experimental observation.

    • Layton A. Hall
    •  & Ayman F. Abouraddy

  • Article |

    Interactions between photons arise due to the presence of optical nonlinearities. In topological Thouless pumps, a sufficiently strong nonlinearity leads to soliton transport with a fractionally quantized plateau structure—reminiscent of transport in the fractional quantum Hall effect.

    • Marius Jürgensen
    • , Sebabrata Mukherjee
    •  & Mikael C. Rechtsman

  • News & Views |

    Ultrafast laser fields are able to widely tune the physical properties of semiconductors by generating virtual states. Using strong fields at energies below the optical bandgap, control of excitons in two-dimensional semiconductors has now been demonstrated.

    • Ioannis Paradisanos
    •  & Bernhard Urbaszek

  • Article |

    Generalized measurements that do not correspond to conventional basis projections of the quantum wavefunction are a part of several important protocols in quantum information. These measurements can be certifiably performed on higher-dimensional systems using optical fibre technology.

    • Daniel Martínez
    • , Esteban S. Gómez
    •  & Gustavo Lima

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The intermediate states in photo-excited phase transitions are expected to be inhomogeneous. However, ultrafast X-ray imaging shows the early part of the metal–insulator transition in VO2 is homogeneous but then becomes heterogeneous.

    • Allan S. Johnson
    • , Daniel Perez-Salinas
    •  & Simon E. Wall

  • News & Views |

    A clever experiment with a photonic circuit has realized three-dimensional non-Abelian quantum behaviour — introducing an experimental testbed for field and gauge theories.

    • Andrew G. White

  • Letter
    | Open Access

    Photonic waveguides with appropriately engineered interactions allow the experimental realization of non-Abelian quantum holonomies of the symmetry group U(3), which is known from the strong nuclear force.

    • Vera Neef
    • , Julien Pinske
    •  & Alexander Szameit

  • News & Views |

    Manipulating the chirality of electron vortices using attosecond metrology allows the clocking of continuum–continuum transitions, bringing the dream of time-resolved quantum physics a little closer.

    • Jean Marcel Ngoko Djiokap

  • Letter |

    Interspecies comparisons between atomic optical clocks are important for several technological applications. A recently proposed spectroscopy technique extends the interrogation times of clocks, leading to highly stable comparison between species.

    • May E. Kim
    • , William F. McGrew
    •  & David R. Leibrandt

  • Article |

    Attosecond circular-dichroism chronoscopy—a spectroscopy technique that employs two circularly polarized pulses in co-rotating and counter-rotating geometries—can measure the amplitudes and phases of continuum–continuum transitions in electron vortices.

    • Meng Han
    • , Jia-Bao Ji
    •  & Hans Jakob Wörner

  • Article |

    Hexagonal boron nitride is a common component of 2D heterostructures. Defects implanted in boron nitride crystals can be used to perform spatially resolved sensing of properties, including temperature, magnetism and current.

    • A. J. Healey
    • , S. C. Scholten
    •  & J.-P. Tetienne

  • Research Briefing |

    The spatiotemporal profile of the electric field around a high-energy electron beam was visualized using an ultrafast technique based on electro-optic sampling. By investigating the formation of the Coulomb field it was possible to experimentally confirm the validity of the predictions of special relativity regarding electromagnetic fields.

  • News & Views |

    Quantum sensing that uses electron spins in diamond can perform precise magnetic field measurements but does not work well at high magnetic fields. An alternative approach involving the spins of carbon-13 nuclei can operate in the high-field regime.

    • Norikazu Mizuochi

  • 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

  • Comment |

    Random lasers made out of disordered media have a rich but often unpredictable laser light emission, in all directions and over many frequencies. Strategies for taming random lasing are emerging, which have the potential to deliver programmable lasers with unprecedented properties.

    • Riccardo Sapienza

  • Perspective |

    Multiple scattering of light in complex and disordered media scrambles optical information. This Perspective showcases how this often detrimental physical mixing can be exploited to extract and process information for optical imaging and computing.

    • Sylvain Gigan

  • Review Article |

    Nonlinearities allow the large number of modes in a multimode fibre to interact and create emergent phenomena. This Review presents the breadth of the high-dimensional nonlinear physics that can be studied in this platform.

    • Logan G. Wright
    • , Fan O. Wu
    •  & Frank W. Wise

  • Review Article |

    Multiple scattering fundamentally complicates the task of sending light through turbid media, as many applications require. This Review summarizes the theoretical framework and experimental techniques to understand and control these processes.

    • Hui Cao
    • , Allard Pieter Mosk
    •  & Stefan Rotter

  • Perspective |

    It is not immediately obvious whether photons retain the information they carry when they traverse a disordered or multimodal medium. This Perspective discusses the extent to which the quantum properties of light can be preserved and controlled.

    • Ohad Lib
    •  & Yaron Bromberg

  • Review Article |

    Seeing—and consequently imaging—through turbid media such as fog is a difficult task, as multiple scattering scrambles the visual information. This Review summarizes techniques that physically or computationally reconstruct the images.

    • Jacopo Bertolotti
    •  & Ori Katz

  • News & Views |

    All-optical devices hold promise as a platform for ultralow-power, sub-nanosecond photonic classical and quantum information processing. Measurements of the dynamics of a single photon switch unveil the quantum correlations at the root of its operation.

    • Victoria A. Norman
    •  & Marina Radulaski

  • Letter |

    Efficient interactions between two photons is a challenging requirement for quantum information processing. A quantum dot coupled to a waveguide produces strong interactions that can induce photon correlations and reshape two-photon wavepackets.

    • Hanna Le Jeannic
    • , Alexey Tiranov
    •  & Peter Lodahl

  • News & Views |

    An experiment with photonic waveguides demonstrates the connection between non-Abelian holonomies and adiabatic particle transport, paving the way to the geometric and topological control of light trajectories.

    • Laura Pilozzi
    •  & Valentina Brosco

  • Article |

    Non-Abelian Thouless pumping, whose outcome depends on the order of pumping operations, has been observed in photonic waveguides with degenerate flat bands.

    • Yi-Ke Sun
    • , Xu-Lin Zhang
    •  & Hong-Bo Sun

  • 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 |

    Quantum confinement effects offer a more comprehensive understanding of the fundamental processes that drive extreme optical nonlinearities in nano-engineered solids, opening a route to unlocking the potential of high-order harmonic generation.

    • Julien Madéo
    •  & Keshav M. Dani

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