Volume 18

An artistic impression of ‘femtosecond fieldoscopy’, whereby a femtosecond near-infrared light pulse interacts with an ethanol molecule in the liquid phase. A signature of the interaction is imparted on the pulse’s light field, allowing one to retrieve valuable information about the molecular excitation dynamics.

See Srivastava et al.

Artistic impression of a nonlinear Compton scattering experiment in which an electron bunch (blue) is accelerated by a laser wakefield to multi-gigaelectron volt energy and then collides with an ultra-intense petawatt laser pulse (red) and generates a strong gamma-ray beam (purple).

See Mirzaie et al.

Integrating a single-photon avalanche detector (SPAD) array into a confocal laser scanning microscope yields a twofold increase in the localization accuracy for single-molecule localization microscopy. The cover shows an artistic impression of the SPAD array detector with microlenses, where the two disks/shaded Gaussians depict the emission of two different fluorescent molecules hitting the detector array.

See Radmacher et al.

Hyper-Raman optical activity: circularly polarized infrared photons (red helices) incident on molecules arranged on a helical scaffold (white dots) produce hyper-Raman scattering spectra (multicoloured light regions) that feature chirality.

See Valev et al.

A soft ribbon-shaped perovskite electroluminescent display simultaneously offers multicolour output, stretchability, high brightness, and double-sided emission. This dynamic display capability holds promise for broad applications in interactive wearable devices, artificial skin, and soft robotics.

See Chun et al.

Artist’s impression of a waveguide-based terahertz-driven photogun that serves as a compact source of high-energy electrons. The design exploits a movable cathode tip and multiple cells to provide an acceleration gradient as high as ~3 GV/m. Using microjoule-level single-cycle terahertz pulses, electron beams with up to ~14 keV electron energy, 1% energy spread and ~0.015 mm mrad transverse emittance are possible.

See Ying et al.

Lightwave-driven scanning tunnelling spectroscopy, which combines atomic spatial resolution with sub-picosecond temporal resolution and millielectronvolt energy resolution, enables the analysis of the energy dynamics of a single-atom defect in a 2D material excited by phonons.

See Roelcke et al.

Artistic image of an implantable wireless optoelectronic probe for monitoring tissue oxygenation levels within the brain. The microscale implant integrates an LED with a photodetector and is coated with a phosphorescent film which is sensitive to oxygen.

See Cai et al.

Artistic image of the polariton spin Hall effect in a liquid-crystal-filled perovskite microcavity under electrical voltages at room temperature. The findings represent a development in the generation and manipulation of pure polariton spins for spin-optoelectronic applications.

See Liang et al.

Two-photon entangled states with a non-trivial topology are used to form quantum skyrmions that exhibit topological invariance.

See Ornelas et al.

An artistic image of a dual-frequency comb that is generated by using an optical parametric oscillator to convert a pair of near-infrared combs into the mid-infrared. The generated combs enable nanosecond-timescale spectroscopy for probing the ultrafast dynamics found in supersonic gas jets, explosions and chemical kinetics.

See Long et al.

On-chip optoelectronic logic gates that operate in the telecom wavelength band are constructed by integrating multiple silicon waveguides with black phosphorus.

See He et al.