Volume 19 Issue 7, July 2025

Programmable nonlinearities — including control over the response order up to high orders — can now be realized on-chip at ultralow power via field programmability. This advance paves the way for more scalable and energy-efficient photonic computing in applications such as machine learning, optical signal processing and communications, analogue computing and quantum photonics.

Holmium-doped nanoparticles exhibit a novel parallel photon avalanching mechanism, offering controlled chromaticity and enabling sub-diffraction, multicolour bio-imaging upon excitation with a single near-infrared laser.

Quantum light is shown to perturb strong-field interactions in solids, revealing photon bunching in high-harmonic sidebands. The generation of attosecond non-classical states opens up quantum-enhanced photonics in novel temporal and spectral domains.

Attosecond pulses in the optical regime, formed as solitons during infrared laser-pulse compression in a hollow-core fibre, may open up attosecond science in molecules and solids.

The broad applications of emerging photonic technologies, such as photoacoustic imaging, optical wearable sensors, point-of-care testing and optogenetic control, in cardiovascular disease care are reviewed, together with the challenges of integrating these innovations into clinical practice.

Brillouin scattering microscopy is prone to artefacts and inconsistencies. This Consensus statement provides recommendations for measuring and reporting relevant parameters with the aim of standardizing protocols and improving the comparability of studies.

Holmium doping endows upconversion nanoparticles with a dual-reservoir-level mechanism for parallel photon avalanche emission, enabling tunable chromaticity at room temperature, nonlinearity index up to 22 and spatial resolution for multicolour biological imaging down to 78 nm.

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.

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.

Electrochemical modulation of fluorophores enables regulating their emission states, facilitating spectral unmixing of up to four fluorophores with similar spectral characteristics. This method is readily applicable to multicolour STED imaging, effectively expanding a single imaging channel to four channels.

Field-programmable photonic nonlinearity is realized by controlling the spatial distribution of carrier excitations and their dynamic behaviour within an active semiconductor, advancing photonic computing and its integration with reconfigurable computing architectures.

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

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.

Intense squeezed light with focusable intensities of 0.1 TW cm⁻² is created by propagating a classical, intense and noisy input beam through an optical fibre. The noise 4 dB below the shot-noise level is achieved by selecting a set of wavelengths whose intensity fluctuations are maximally anticorrelated.

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.

When high-harmonic emission from a ZnO crystal is perturbed with a bright squeezed vacuum beam, a comb of super-bunched high-order sidebands is created. This indicates photon bunching and the generation of a non-coherent state at the short wavelength.

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.