Nature Photonics - Current issue : December 2008 - Vol 2 No 12
- The dynamics of spinning light
- Nonlinear optics: Doped silica
- Remote synchronization: Drift-free timing
- Random number generation: Chaotic lasers
Latest highlights
Technology focus
Optical metrology is an attractive method for product quality checking owing to its resolution, speed and non–contact approach. It also has the advantages that it is potentially much more cost–effective and practical than competing non-optical techniques.
Focus
Slow light
Focus issue
Control over the velocity of light pulses leads to a host of exciting opportunities. In this special Focus issue, we present a collection of articles that describe the evolution of the field, the fundamental physics and the different approaches that are developing.
Advance online publication
Microdisk lasers
Letter by Mahler et al.
By creating appropriate diffraction gratings along the disk circumference, scientists present a vertically emitting terahertz quantum–cascade microdisk laser, shedding light on the fabrication of arrays of single–mode, highly collimated and powerful terahertz sources.
Current Issue
Ceramic future
Review by Ikesue et al.
A new, refined ceramic material — polycrystalline ceramic — offers practical laser generation and is anticipated to be a highly attractive alternative to conventional glass and single–crystal laser technologies in the future. This article reviews the development of ceramic lasers, the principle of laser generation and some typical results achieved using ceramic lasers so far. The potential future outlook for the field is also given.
Current Issue
Photonic–crystal resonators
Letter by Notomi et al.
Coupled optical resonators are one approach to slowing the propagation of light. Scientists now show that an array of more than 100 such resonators built using photonic crystals can slow light down to below 1% of its speed in a vacuum.
Current Issue
Fast random numbers
Letter by Uchida et al.
Random–number generators promise security in digital information systems. Here, the amplification of microscopic laser noise by chaotic dynamics of semiconductor lasers is shown to be able to assure the non-deterministic property of the bit sequences at high data rates.