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Mid-infrared photonics is the practical application of electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength between two and approximately twenty micrometres. This region includes a number of so-called water windows: wavelengths of light that can propagate through the Earth’s atmosphere without being absorbed by water molecules. It is also highly relevant in spectroscopy.
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.
Mid-infrared 2 μm InAs/InP quantum-dot lasers is first demonstrated, with a low threshold current density of 118 A cm−2 per layer and a maximum operating temperature of 50 °C.
A novel magnetized plasma rotator based on Frequency-Variable Faraday Rotation (FVFR) in the nonlinear plasma wake is put forward, which can manipulate efficiently the polarization of relativistic mid to far-infrared optical pulses and even THz waves.
Laser-printed gold metasurface supporting symmetry-protected plasmonic quasi-bound states in the continuum (qBIC) was fabricated, comprehensively characterized and applied to demonstrate the first qBIC-empowered field-effect transistor device with HgTe quantum dot active medium.
Sources of chiral mid-infrared light are difficult to obtain. Here, the authors demonstrate that twisted bilayers of anisotropic α-MoO3 van der Waals crystals can emit mid-infrared thermal chiral radiation without any lithographic processes.
The performance of infrared photodiodes designed with narrow-bandgap semiconductors is limited by inherent noise and the need for a low-temperature operation to mitigate it, while they also face a speed–efficiency trade-off.
The near-field chirality of a single-symmetry achiral object enables polarization-dependent unidirectional photocurrent generation, and the vectorial output paves a way for a new family of geometric photodetectors.
