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The same property that gives stained glass windows their sublime beauty is being crafted in the latest nanophotonic technologies, says Anatoly V. Zayats.

Chemical reactions in nanoscale gaps can be controlled by hot electrons generated by voltage-induced tunnelling.

Metamaterials enable the control and manipulation of light on subwavelength scales, allowing numerous optical device applications. Here, the authors show the selective excitation of spatially confined modes in an anisotropic hyperbolic metamaterial, based on the photonic spin Hall effect.

Integrated plasmonic sources are crucial in the development of plasmonic circuitry. Here, McPolin et al. show that vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers can be employed as an on-chip, electrically pumped source or detector of plasmonic signals and also demonstrate waveguiding and frequency conversion on this platform.

Quasi-BICs and SLRs are typically studied separately. We demonstrate that these two collective resonances can hybridise in dielectric metasurfaces, reaching the strong coupling regime. Controlling such a regime by means of incident polarisation and the surrounding medium leads to a modulation of the system response, opening opportunities for tunable nanophotonics.

Combining nanostructured magnetic media with nanoplasmonic antennas has propelled commercially viable data-storage densities beyond one terabit per square inch.

Controlling the directional scattering of chiral light at the nanoscale is important for optical technologies. Here, the authors present a concept of rotating chiral dipoles to achieve unidirectional enantio-sensitive chiral scattering.

The polarization state of light is analogous to the spin state of electrons, enabling equivalent phenomena to be explored in optics as in the solid state. Here, the authors study directional scattering of light from nanostructured surfaces, arising from a spin-orbit coupling effect for surface plasmon waves.

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.

In this work, V. Aita et al. investigate the interaction of vector vortex beams with anisotropic metamaterials, showing how, depending on the state of polarization, their plasmonic resonances can be excited and exploited to modify the beam structure.

Progress has been made in the development of low-loss monocrystalline plasmonic metals, opening up opportunities for ultrathin nanophotonic architectures. Here, the authors reveal differences in hot-electron thermalisation dynamics between ultrathin monocrystalline and polycrystalline gold films.

Picosecond all-optical switching of the polarization of visible light is achieved by using the anisotropy and nonlinearity of a hyperbolic metamaterial.

In nanoplasmonic systems symmetry can often suppress the second harmonic generation (SHG) is spite of the highly enhanced fields. Here, the authors demonstrate light-induced symmetry breaking that enables strong SHG enhancement from symmetric nanophotonic systems with certain properties.

Nonlinear optical properties of conventional materials have limited spectral tuneability as they are defined by the material properties themselves. Here, the authors demonstrate that strong nonlinearity can be achieved in metamaterials where negligible nonlinearity of the constituent materials exists.

Here, the authors engineer a non-uniform electron temperature distribution through nanostructuring and demonstrate a sub-300 fs switching time. This can assist in the design of nanostructures for nonlinear optics, hot carrier extraction and photocatalysis

Some optical forces can direct particles, but only in the direction of light propagation. Here, the authors show theoretically that when the spin of the incident circularly polarized light is converted into lateral electromagnetic momentum, it leads to a lateral optical force associated with a recoil mechanical force.

Magnetic textures known as skyrmions have gathered much attention in recent years. It is now shown that focused vector beams can also give rise to photonic skyrmion-like structures.

One of the main features of plasmonics is the possibility to locally enhance the intensity of electromagnetic fields. This enables strong non-linear optical effects in structures with metal inclusions, including metamaterials. This Review discusses nonlinear effects in plasmonic structures and presents an overview of applications and limitations.

Advances in the understanding of optical skyrmions, within a unified topological framework, are reviewed. The field structure of such optical quasiparticles, and their topological characteristics, may be useful for fields ranging from imaging to quantum technologies.