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Detecting the chirality of molecules is important in optics, biomedicine, and materials science, but the molecular chiroptical signals are typically weak in conventional circular dichroism. Here, the authors demonstrate strong chiroptical responses that reflect the molecular chirality in a single chiral nanoassembly synthesized from L/D-cystines.

Chiral light emission usually requires twisted or asymmetric nanostructures. Here, the authors show that even out-of plane symmetric metasurfaces can emit circularly polarized light, achieved by tuning an anisotropic continuum rather than breaking symmetry.

Wavefront control is inherently incompatible with thermal incoherence in general. To address this challenge, the authors propose a meta-emitter architecture featuring two tailored grooves interconnected by a waveguide tunnel enabling the conversion of thermal photons into coherent surface waves, thereby experimentally demonstrating feasible thermal wavefront manipulation— including thermal self-focusing and holography.

On-chip circularly polarized light (CPL) detectors are relevant for various applications, but current approaches have shown a trade-off between wide spectral detection range, high discrimination ratio and high polarization sensitivity. Here, the authors report broadband high-performance CPL detectors based on twisted black phosphorus structures.

Topological metamaterial clothing based on metallic conductive textiles can be used to create robust biosensing networks on the human body that can monitor vital signs during exercise.

By twisting bilayer conductive layers with engineered diffusivity, the authors realize moiré-driven thermal localization without nonlinearity, enabling commensurate and quasi-crystalline thermal patterns for programmable transport control.

Applying concepts from non-Hermitian physics to diffusive systems enables the static control of heat transport. Now, this notion is expanded to dynamic control, including a demonstration of programmed thermal transport in a metamaterial.

Phonon engineering with anisotropic Lorentz-type dielectric oscillations enables the creation of hyperbolic asymptotic line polaritons, achieving broadband diffraction-free propagation.

This work proposes a wet-chemical etching assisted aberration-enhanced single-pulsed femtosecond laser nanolithography, named “WEALTH”, for manufacturing small-size, large-area, deep holey nanostructures, promising for emerging nanophotonic devices.

A two-dimensional van der Waals material, NbOCl₂, that simultaneously exhibits near-unity linear dichroism (~99%) over 100 nm bandwidth in ultraviolet regime and large birefringence (0.26–0.46) within a wide visible–near-infrared transparency window is reported.

Achieving wide-gamut structural colours with brightness control is challenging. Here, the authors demonstrate colours beyond Rec.2020 and continuous, polarizer-free brightness tuning in dielectric metasurfaces via mode interference and diffraction control.

The authors demonstrate an efficient way to generate high-purity vortex beams by applying optical neural networks to cascaded phase-only metasurfaces. Specifically, they present record-high-quality Laguerre-Gaussian (LG_p,l) optical modes with polynomial orders p = 10 and l = 200 with purity in p, l and relative conversion efficiency of 96%, 85%, and 70%, respectively.

The use of a nanopillar lattice and orbital angular momentum provides control over the directionality of light emission on the nanoscale.

Using channel-level decoupling to design independent photovoltage channels for each Stokes parameter with minimal crosstalk, a metaphotonic photodetector can be created that provides direct Stokes quantification.

Here, the authors demonstrate a multi-momentum transformation metasurface. The orbital angular momentum meta-transformer reconstructs different vortex beams into on-axis distinct patterns, and the linear momentum meta-transformer converts red, green and blue beams to vivid color images.

Here, the authors demonstrate a re-programmable metasurface that can produce arbitrary holographic images for optical encryption. The encrypted information is divided into two matrices and defined to the incident laser to produce arbitrary holographic images.

Holographic techniques allow for the construction of 3D images by controlling the wave front of light beams. Huang et al.develop ultrathin plasmonic metasurfaces to provide 3D optical holographic image reconstruction in the visible and near-infrared regions for circularly polarized light.

Metasurfaces offer an approach for computer generated holograms with good efficiency and ease of fabrication. Here, Ye et al.report on spin and wavelength multiplexed nonlinear metasurface holography, showing construction of holographic images using fundamental and harmonic generation waves of different spins.

The wide range of properties encountered in metamaterials make them promising for numerous optical applications. Chenet al. build a plasmonic flat metamaterial lens with an abrupt phase change that functions as a convex lens for one handedness of light and a concave lens for the other.

Chiral metasurfaces have been produced, with experimental observation of intrinsic chiral bound states in the continuum, which may lead to applications in chiral light sources and detectors, chiral sensing, valleytronics and asymmetric photocatalysis.

The authors demonstrate ultra-broadband microscale optical dispersion in LiNbO₃ crystals, enabling precise and robust on-demand dispersion engineering in free space, with strong potential for applications in informatics and spectroscopy.

Realizing metasurfaces with reconfigurability, high efficiency, and control over phase and amplitude is a challenge. Here, Li et al. introduce a reprogrammable hologram based on a 1-bit coding metasurface, where the state of each unit cell of the coding metasurface can be switched electrically.

We demonstrate a 3D generalized vector vortex array generation with full polarization, phase, OAM, and spatial control, by using joint optimization in different diffraction orders based on a single-layer metasurface.

Authors showcase a framework for visual perception enhancement system based on vision-driven metasurfaces. It can help humans obtain information in multiple frequency bands and allows the metasurface platform with more interesting functions.

An unconventional machine learning-based inverse design framework enables the generation of ultrabroadband and band-selective thermal meta-emitters with complex 3D architectures and diverse material compositions.

The authors demonstrate on-chip circularly polarized light detection using the chiral properties of transition metal dichalcogenide valleytronic transistors on centrosymmetric plasmonic metamaterials.

Spatiotemporal beams differ from standard spatial structured light. The authors introduce 2D spacetime duality to uncover the conventional–spatiotemporal beam connection, enabling the development of high-fidelity spatiotemporal beams.

Topological photonic structures enable robust light transport but face coupling challenges. The authors demonstrate transverse spin matching governs the coupling between the topological waveguide and waveguide, achieving 96.3% theoretical and 94.2% experimental transmission efficiencies.

The position and emission wavelengths of single quantum dots embedded in a one-dimensional planar cavity can be simultaneously determined from a single photoluminescence image with 15 nm spatial accuracy and subnanometric spectral accuracy in the near-infrared.

The design and optimization of a metasurface is a computationally- and time-consuming effort. Here, the authors propose a neural network-based algorithm for functional metasurface design, and demonstrate it for some functional metasurfaces.

Optical tweezers can apply 3D forces to trap and move microparticles, but application of 3D optical torques for controlled rotations remains challenging. Here, the authors report a technique for controlling 3D optical torque via a single beam, achieving dynamic 3D rotations around an arbitrary axis.

Realizing conversion between microwave and optical signals in free space is a challenge. Here, the authors propose and demonstrate a programmable metasurface that can achieve wireless microwave-laser interconversion for bidirectional air-water cross-media wireless communications.

Simultaneous control of the direction and polarization of quantum emission using photonic nanostructures is a long-standing challenge in photonics. Here, the authors experimentally demonstrate unidirectional chiral emission from a twisted bilayer metasurface with multi-dimensional control.

The authors introduce a loss-enhanced magneto-optical effect and sublinearly amplify the frequency response of a non-Hermitian optical cavity under different background magnetic fields. This effect is exploited to detect subtle magnetic field variations against a strong background with enhanced system response and sensitivity.

The detection of light intensity, polarization, and spectral information with a single device is desired for efficient optical sensing and computing applications. Here, the authors report the realization of metasurface-assisted graphene photodetectors able to simultaneously detect polarization states and wavelengths of broadband infrared light.

Moiré quasicrystals exhibit many exotic phenomena. Here, the authors report an acoustic moiré quasicrystal that not only achieves a localization-delocalization transition, but also enables wave propagation shifting from diffusion to canalization or localization.

A real–momentum topological photonic crystal that harnesses real-space disorder is used to generate a Pancharatnam–Berry phase while preserving momentum-space topology.

Achieving sustainability in wireless communications is crucial yet poses significant challenges. To address this, the authors propose and demonstrate a solar-powered programmable metasurface enabling hybrid light-to-microwave wireless communications.

A 2 nm displacement resolution of a centimetre-sized object in a 3 cm cavity is demonstrated.

The authors reveal hyperbolic-to-hyperbolic transitions where two nearby Reststrahlen bands just touch each other. Such phenomena are prevalent in isostructural rare-earth oxyorthosilicates and unfolds vast opportunities for broadband on-chip light control.