Nature Photonics - Current issue : October 2009 - Vol 3 No 10
- Nature's perfect waveplate
- Single-photon sources: Driven by sound
- Organic solar cells: New ingredients
- Optical antennas: Infrared emission
Latest highlights
Technology focus
Hyperspectral imaging is a powerful tool for remotely monitoring the health of vegetation as well as benefiting applications in process control and quality assurance.
Focus
Super-resolution imaging
Focus issue
Optical imaging beyond the diffraction limit of light is revolutionizing sample analysis in the biological and physical sciences. In this special Focus Issue, a collection of articles are presented, detailing the fundamental physics, the different approaches and the applications where super-resolution imaging can be of help.
Current issue
Solar cells
Letter by Chen et al.
Adding electron-withdrawing groups to the backbone of the polymer PBDTTT increases the open-circuit voltage of photovoltaic cells, resulting in a polymer solar-cell that has a certified power-conversion efficiency of 6.77%.
Current issue
Single-photon source
Letter by Couto et al.
By exploiting the moving piezoelectric potential modulation induced by an acoustic phonon, scientists achieve controllable transfer of electrons and holes between a quantum well and a quantum dot, and use it to realize a high-frequency single-photon source with tunable emission energy.
Current issue
Photonic crystals
Letter by Goldberg et al.
Excitonic-lattice polaritons in photonic crystals can be observed by coupling excitons and Bloch waves in a periodic arrangement of GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells. Tunable by electric field, these hybrid states may allow slow-light-enhanced nonlinear effects and enable observation of macroscopic coherence phenomena in solid-state systems.
Current Issue
Biophotonics
Letter by Roberts et al.
A natural quarter-wave retarder in the eye of a stomatopod is demonstrated to have an achromaticity in the visible wavelength regime, outperforming existing designs of synthetic optical retarders and potentially benefiting future data storage systems and data projectors.
