Optical physics articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors demonstrated an unprecedented level of polarization squeezing of light generated by an atomic ensemble, and a new regime of continuous quantum measurements on a macroscopic material oscillator.

    • Christian Bærentsen
    • , Sergey A. Fedorov
    •  & Eugene S. Polzik

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The laser pulses that drive most laser wakefield accelerators have wavelengths near 1 micrometer and peak power > 100 terawatts. Here, the authors drive plasma wakes with 10 micrometer, 2-terawatt pulses, yielding relativistic electron beams with a collimated, narrow-energy-bandwidth component.

    • R. Zgadzaj
    • , J. Welch
    •  & M. C. Downer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Color centers in diamond have been proposed as a link between remote superconducting units in hybrid quantum systems, where their orbital degree of freedom is utilized. Here the authors report coherent electric-field control of the orbital state of a neutral NV center in diamond.

    • Hodaka Kurokawa
    • , Keidai Wakamatsu
    •  & Hideo Kosaka

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Surface acoustic wave devices enable modern electronics and are desirable for quantum systems. Here the authors access and control these devices optically, enabling high acoustic quality factors, materials spectroscopy, and hybrid quantum systems.

    • Arjun Iyer
    • , Yadav P. Kandel
    •  & William H. Renninger

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Carbon nanotube-based single photon emitters allow for room-temperature operation, but suffer from vanishing indistinguishability due to strong dephasing. Following a theoretical proposal, the authors tackle the problem experimentally by using a cavity to enhance the photon coherence time and the emission spectral density in the regime of incoherent good cavity-coupling.

    • Lukas Husel
    • , Julian Trapp
    •  & Alexander Högele

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Achieving acoustic waveguides with low loss, tailorability, and easy fabrication is a considerable challenge. Here, the authors introduce suspended anti-resonant acoustic waveguides with superior confinement and high selectivity of acoustic modes, supporting both forward and backward SBS on chip.

    • Peng Lei
    • , Mingyu Xu
    •  & Xiaopeng Xie

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Abbe’s diffraction limit has been a defining concept for microscopy. With finite photon, photon noise remains one essential factor yet to be considered in the theoretical resolution limit. Here, the authors introduced information-based resolution limit allowing for photon-considered resolution assessment of various microscopy and super-resolution modalities.

    • Yilun Li
    •  & Fang Huang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Caustics, as a unique type of singularity in wave phenomena, occur in diverse physical systems. Here, the authors realize multi-dimensional customization of caustics with 3D-printed metasurfaces. This arbitrary caustic engineering is poised to bring new revolutions to many domains.

    • Xiaoyan Zhou
    • , Hongtao Wang
    •  & Cheng-Wei Qiu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A promising strategy for scaling trapped-ion-based quantum technologies is to use fully integrated optical waveguides to deliver light to numerous ions at multiple sites. Here, the authors. optically address three ions using on-chip waveguides to deliver three distinct wavelengths per ion, and perform Rabi flopping on each ion simultaneously.

    • Joonhyuk Kwon
    • , William J. Setzer
    •  & Hayden J. McGuinness

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Room-temperature phosphorescence usually occurs immediately after the removal of excitation. Here the authors achieve combined instant and delayed phosphorescence through introduction of phosphines into carbazole emitters.

    • Guang Lu
    • , Jing Tan
    •  & Hui Xu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Photonic time crystal refers to a material whose dielectric properties oscillate in time. Here the authors theoretically show such behaviour in the excitonic insulator candidate Ta2NiSe5 under optical excitation and use it to explain the enhanced THz reflectivity recently observed in pump-probe experiments

    • Marios H. Michael
    • , Sheikh Rubaiat Ul Haque
    •  & Eugene Demler

  • Article
    | Open Access

    All holographic displays and imaging techniques are fundamentally limited by the étendue supported by existing spatial light modulators. Here, the authors report on using artificial intelligence (AI) to learn an étendue expanding element that effectively increases étendue by two orders of magnitude.

    • Ethan Tseng
    • , Grace Kuo
    •  & Felix Heide

  • Article
    | Open Access

    An efficient way of realising a large number of telecom single-photon emitters for quantum communication is still missing. Here, the authors use a wide-field imaging technique for fast localization of single InAs/InP quantum dots, which are then integrated into circular Bragg grating cavities featuring high single-photon purity and indistinguishability.

    • Paweł Holewa
    • , Daniel A. Vajner
    •  & Elizaveta Semenova

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Correlated insulator states of moire excitons in transition metal dichalcogenide heterostructures have attracted significant attention recently. Here the authors use time-resolved pump-probe spectroscopy to demonstrate the effects of non-equilibrium correlations of moire excitons in WSe2/WS2 heterobilayers.

    • Jinjae Kim
    • , Jiwon Park
    •  & Hyunyong Choi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Optical recurrent neural networks present a unique challenge for photonic machine learning. Here, the authors experimentally show the first optoacoustic recurrent operator based on stimulated Brillouin scattering which may unlock a new class of optical neural networks with recurrent functionality.

    • Steven Becker
    • , Dirk Englund
    •  & Birgit Stiller

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here, the authors perform Faraday rotation spectroscopy around the excitonic transitions in hBN-encapsulated WSe2 and MoSe2 monolayers, and interlayer excitons in MoS2 bilayers. They measure a large Verdet constant - 1.9 × 107 deg T−¹cm−¹ for monolayers, and attribute it to the giant oscillator strength and high g-factor of the excitons.

    • Benjamin Carey
    • , Nils Kolja Wessling
    •  & Ashish Arora

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Parity detection is essential in quantum error correction. Here, authors propose a reliable joint parity measurement (JPM) scheme inspired by stimulated emission and experimentally implement the weight-2(4) JPM scheme in a tunable coupling superconducting circuit, which shows comparable performance to the standard CNOT-gate based scheme.

    • Sainan Huai
    • , Kunliang Bu
    •  & Yicong Zheng

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Band engineering in optics allows the design of unconventional forms of light with potential optoelectronic applications. Here, the authors realize slow-light intercavity polaritons in an array of coupled cavities, the photonic architecture enables the spatial segregation of photons and excitons

    • Yesenia A. García Jomaso
    • , Brenda Vargas
    •  & Giuseppe Pirruccio

  • Article
    | Open Access

    2D metallic single crystals are sought after for nanophotonic applications, but their synthesis remains challenging. Here, the authors report an atomic level precision etching method to fabricate large-area crystalline gold flakes with nanometre thickness, showing enhanced plasmonic and nonlinear optical properties.

    • Chenxinyu Pan
    • , Yuanbiao Tong
    •  & Pan Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The advent of isolated attosecond XUV pulse sources marks a new era in attosecond science, pivotal for the investigation of core electron dynamics. Here the authors discover that the coherent Raman coupling between the cation states leads to extra timedelay between different transition channels by applying the attosecond transient absorption spectroscopy on the investigation of complex dynamics of strong field ionization of Krypton.

    • Li Wang
    • , Guangru Bai
    •  & Zengxiu Zhao

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Usual multiqubit entangled states can be described using the graph formalism, where each edge connects only two qubits. Here, instead, the authors use a reprogrammable silicon photonics chip to showcase preparation, verification and processing of arbitrary four-qubit hypergraph states, where hyperedges describe entanglement within a subset of many qubits.

    • Jieshan Huang
    • , Xudong Li
    •  & Jianwei Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Anisotropic light-matter excitations in van der Waals materials are expected to have an impact on nanophotonics applications. Here, the authors report the observation of canalized in-plane mid-infrared plasmons in the semimetallic phase of WS2 and demonstrate their electrical tunability via ion intercalation.

    • Qiaoxia Xing
    • , Jiasheng Zhang
    •  & Hugen Yan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Manipulating quantum information encoded in a bosonic mode requires sizeable and controllable nonlinearities, but superconducting devices’ strong nonlinearities are normally static. Here, the authors use a SNAIL to suppress static nonlinearities and use drive-dependent ones to reach universal control of a bosonic mode.

    • Axel M. Eriksson
    • , Théo Sépulcre
    •  & Simone Gasparinetti

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Polarization serves as an excellent information encoding carrier. Here, authors expand the metasurface encoding dimensionality of polarization information by engineering the Poincaré Sphere trajectory with generalized Malus’ law, unveiling new opportunities for advanced polarization optics.

    • Zi-Lan Deng
    • , Meng-Xia Hu
    •  & Andrea Alù

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Topological properties of a photonic environment are crucial to engineer robust photon-mediated interactions between quantum emitters. Here, the authors find general theorems on the topology of photon-mediated interactions, unveiling the phenomena of topological preservation and reversal.

    • Federico Roccati
    • , Miguel Bello
    •  & Angelo Carollo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    T centers in silicon are promising candidates for quantum applications yet suffer from weak optical transitions. Here, by integrating with a silicon nanocavity, the authors demonstrate an enhancement of the photon emission rate for a single T center.

    • Adam Johnston
    • , Ulises Felix-Rendon
    •  & Songtao Chen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Miniaturized and efficient optical modulators are desired for data transmission, processing and communication. Here, the authors report the fabrication of exciton-polariton Mach–Zehnder modulators based on thin WS2 waveguides with a footprint of ~30 μm², modulation ratio up to −6.20 dB and nanosecond response times.

    • Seong Won Lee
    • , Jong Seok Lee
    •  & Su-Hyun Gong

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Polaritons, light-matter hybridized quasiparticles, are the fundamental excitation of strong coupling systems and are widely applicable in information technologies. Here the authors applied the concept of time-of-flight measurement in terahertz induced second harmonic generation experiments in various systems to comprehensively study the dispersion relation of phonon-polaritons and reveal potential spin-lattice couplings.

    • Tianchuang Luo
    • , Batyr Ilyas
    •  & Nuh Gedik

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Interfacing single-photon emitters (SPEs) with high-finesse cavities can prevent decoherence processes, especially at elevated temperature, but its implementation remains challenging. Here, the authors report room-temperature strong coupling of SPEs in hexagonal boron nitride with a dielectric cavity based on bound states in the continuum, showing a Rabi splitting of ~ 4 meV.

    • T. Thu Ha Do
    • , Milad Nonahal
    •  & Son Tung Ha

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Metasurfaces processing incoming images have been proposed in the context of real space operations. Here, the authors demonstrate mathematical operations, such as differentiation, on the angular spectrum of an image using metasurfaces, which can be used to enhance spectral features of an image.

    • Ming Deng
    • , Michele Cotrufo
    •  & Lin Chen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Malakar et al. investigate the photochemical dynamics in the isomerization of bacteriorhodopsin light and dark-adapted forms and in the first photocycle intermediate, K. The results prompt a reevaluation of the counter ion model, revealing that a different protonation then that shown in the classic quadrupole so far considered must be employed to account for the experimental data.

    • Partha Malakar
    • , Samira Gholami
    •  & Sanford Ruhman

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    I argue that a surface emitting laser that remains single mode irrespective of its size, a scale-invariant laser, should of necessity also waste light at the edge. This is a fundamental departure from the Schawlow-Townes two-mirror strategy that keeps light away from mirrors and edges to preserve gain and minimize loss. The strategy was implemented in the recent discovery of the Berkeley Surface Emitting Laser (BerkSEL).

    • Boubacar Kanté

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Principal optical axes define light-matter interactions in crystals and they are usually assumed to be stationary. Here, the authors report the observation of wavelength-dependent principal optical axes in ternary van der Waals crystals (ReS2 and ReSe2), leading to wavelength-switchable propagation directions of their waveguide modes.

    • Georgy A. Ermolaev
    • , Kirill V. Voronin
    •  & Kostya S. Novoselov

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