Research articles

Combining a low-coherence source with silicon nitride ring resonators featuring normal group velocity dispersion enables electrically pumped, high-power microcombs, providing on-chip power up to 158 mW and high-coherence comb lines with linewidths as narrow as 200 kHz.

Single-chain polymer dots used as ultrasmall fluorescent probes enable nanometre-resolution imaging and are capable of tracking kinesin-1 stepwise motion in living cells using a standard spinning-disk confocal microscope.

The high-contrast dielectric boundary between a gold–air hybrid structure and its sharp spatial features are exploited to provide the momentum required for the excitation of higher-order hyperbolic phonon polaritons.

Quantized vortices are observed in a Bose–Einstein condensate.

A miniaturized ultraviolet spectral imager based on a cascaded AlGaN/GaN photodiode with a compositionally graded active region enables spectral imaging in the 250–365 nm range. The device allows the classification of different types of organics, such as oils and milk, in a single-shot imaging modality.

By exploiting an optical thermodynamic framework, researchers demonstrate universal routing of light. Specifically, light launched into any input port of a nonlinear array is universally channelled into a tightly localized ground state. The principles of optical thermodynamics demonstrated may enable new optical functionalities.

Irradiation with a pulsed Laguerre–Gaussian laser beam of charge one enables correcting the third-order spherical aberration of an electron beam.

Researchers observe directional strong coupling on the nanoscale between hyperbolic phonon polaritons and pentacene molecules.

Although typical microwave isolators provide 20 dB of isolation, a topological isolator—based on a one-way edge waveguide—enables 100 dB isolation due to the near-complete absorption of the backward-propagating mode. In theory, 200 dB of isolation is possible within a single-wavelength-size device.

A terahertz field exceeding 1 V nm⁻¹ induced a structural phase transition in the top atomic layer of a bulk WTe₂ crystal. Differential imaging revealed a surface shift of 7 ± 3 pm and an electronic signature consistent with a topological phase transition.

Organic permeable base transistors featuring a porous aluminium electrode within the semiconductor channel enable high photo-gain and charge storage simultaneously. The transistors achieve retention times beyond 10.000 s while operating at less than 2 V with responsivity as high as 10⁹ A W⁻¹.

Using low-threshold and dispersion engineering, a 2.6-octave frequency comb is generated on a LiNbO₃ chip via an optical parametric oscillator with only 121 fJ. The optical parametric oscillator design eases the requirements for quality factor and relatively narrow spectral coverage of the cavity.

Two types of on-chip silicon device utilizing silicon T centres are developed: an O-band light-emitting diode and an electrically triggered single-photon source. Further, a new method of spin initialization with electrical excitation is demonstrated.

Counterintuitively, the presence of water is found to improve the performance of quantum-dot light-emitting diodes.

An optical sieve—an array of optically resonant voids in gallium arsenide—enables sorting, detecting and counting nanoplastics as small as a few hundreds of nanometres at concentrations as low as 150 μg ml⁻¹ in lake water samples.

A tree-like arrangement of dichroic mirrors and multiple cameras coupled with an iterative spectral unmixing algorithm enables multispectral imaging of live cells in up to eight spectral channels with diffraction-limited spatial resolution and temporal resolution of 0.3 s for imaging a full cell volume.

Microstructured air-core optical fibre provides unprecedented low-loss transmission of light signals over a broad wavelength window.

Lanbow, a palette of fluorophores with tunable near-infrared absorption and single-band emission in the shortwave infrared, enables up to nine-colour imaging in deep tissue and precise image-guided surgery in mammals.

A photonic processor based on a diffractive tensorized unit enables million-TOPS general-purpose computing. The approach challenges the generality and scalability constraints of diffractive computing and enables orders-of-magnitude improvements in energy efficiency over a high-end electronic tensor core processor.

Using the well-established foundry-based lithium niobate nanophotonics platform, a general electro-optic digital-to-analogue link with ultrahigh bandwidth (>150 Gb s⁻¹) and ultralow power consumption (0.058 pJ b⁻¹) is demonstrated, providing a direct, energy-efficient, high-speed and scalable solution for interfacing digital electronics and photonics.