Research articles

Solvent engineering by the addition of 1,4-butane sultone in a perovskite precursor solution simultaneously enhances the crystallization of the perovskite and passivates defects, resulting in a power conversion efficiency of 26.5%.

Combining attosecond metrology and soliton dynamics in hollow-core fibres, the generation of attosecond laser pulses from the deep-ultraviolet to the near-infrared regime and the measurement of attosecond solitons with 350-as durations at optical wavelengths are demonstrated, providing an efficient route to generate intense isolated attosecond pulses complementary to those based on high-harmonic generation in gases.

The generation of spatiotemporal optical vortices in the extreme-ultraviolet regime is demonstrated via high harmonic generation. Topologically coupled at the nanometre and attosecond domains, these light beams are attractive for exploring electronic dynamics in magnetic materials, chiral media and nanostructures.

Self-injection locking of an on-chip laser to a milimetre-scale vacuum-gap Fabry–Pérot cavity is demonstrated, with a phase noise of –97 dBc Hz^–1 at a 10-kHz offset frequency and a fractional frequency stability of 5 × 10⁻¹³ at 10 ms, enabling next-generation high-performance integrated systems.

The introduction of sodium heparin passivates interface defects and enhances bonding between the electron transport layer and the perovskite layer in perovskite solar cells. The best-performing devices exhibit a certified PCE of 26.54% and maintain almost 95% of their initial performance after 1,800 h of maximum power point tracking.

Electrochemical modulation enables iSCAT microscopy to detect the electrical activity of live cells by localizing and identifying different types of ion channels down to the single-channel level and imaging frame rates up to 1.5 kHz.

A turn-key-operable hybrid integrated Pockels laser based on an external distributed Bragg waveguide grating reflector fabricated in a wafer-scale thin-film lithium niobate on insulator platform is demonstrated, with a tuning efficiency of over 550 MHz V^–1, tuning rates reaching the exahertz per second, and a high output power of 15 mW.

A reconstruction method for image scanning microscopy exploits all the information encoded in the four-dimensional image scanning microscopy dataset to achieve optical sectioning and maintain super-resolution and high-signal-to-noise-ratio imaging.

A nano-optical probe of the Purcell effect in a van der Waals waveguide is demonstrated, exploiting its highly confined infrared waveguide modes and the capacity for infrared emission in the monolayer limit of atomically layered van der Waals materials.

An ultra-compact, ultra-wide-bandwidth in-phase/quadrature modulator on a silicon chip is demonstrated, enabling coherent transmission for symbol rates up to 180 Gbaud and a net bit rate surpassing 1 Tb s⁻¹ over an 80 km span, with modulation energy consumption as low as 10.4 fJ bit⁻¹, and promising enhanced performance and scalability for future networking infrastructures.

Combining advanced photonics with reconfigurable liquid crystalline self-assembled structures allows control of a liquid crystal’s microlaser emission by nanosecond optical pulses and the ability to switch off the laser emission from the liquid crystal using the resonant stimulated-emission depletion process, providing a design for a new class of photonic integrated devices.

A quantum kernel estimation by which feature data points are evaluated through the unitary evolution of two-boson Fock states is experimentally demonstrated on a photonic integrated processor. This model provides enhanced accuracy with respect to commonly used classical methods for several classification tasks.

A convolutional network that approaches the fundamental Cramér–Rao bound is demonstrated to localize a reflective target hidden behind a dynamically fluctuating scattering medium, advancing algorithmic developments in the field of computational imaging.

Crystalline perovskites in an optical cavity exhibit nonlinear optical effects under continuous-wave excitation, including optical bistability and polarization rotation.

Ultrathin multilayer van der Waals material stacks are shaped into precisely engineered resonant nanostructures, giving strong nonlinearities at ultralow fluences of <1 nJ cm^–2, more than three orders of magnitude smaller than in previous two-dimensional-material-based cavity systems.

By leveraging microcavity-integrated photonics and Kerr-induced optical frequency division, an integrated photonic millimetre-wave oscillator with low phase noise is demonstrated, achieving –77 dBc Hz^–1 and –121 dBc Hz^–1, respectively, at 100-Hz and 10-kHz offset frequencies, corresponding to –98 dBc Hz^–1 and –142 dBc Hz^–1 when scaled to a 10-GHz carrier.

A compact optical frequency division system with magnesium-fluoride-microresonator-based frequency references and silicon-nitride-microresonator-based comb generators is reported, offering a soliton pulse train at 25-GHz microwaves with an absolute phase noise of –141 dBc Hz^–1 and timing noise below 546 zs Hz^–1/2 at a 10-kHz offset frequency.

Chirality-induced quantum non-reciprocity of cross-channel correlations is demonstrated in a rubidium vapour system by flipping the flow direction of one of the circularly polarized laser beams. It can be extended to multicolour sidebands with Floquet engineering.

Exploiting the polariton-enhanced Purcell effect in tandem organic light-emitting diodes enables deep-blue-emitting devices with an external quantum efficiency of 36.8% and an LT90 lifetime of 830 h at an initial luminance of 500 cd m⁻². These metrics are increased to 56% and 1,800 h with substrate light outcoupling.

Using two-point optical frequency division based on a frequency-agile single-mode dispersive wave, a microwave signal source with record-low phase noise using a microcomb is demonstrated, offering over tenfold lower phase noise than state-of-the-art approaches.