NEWS - PHOTONICS

In the quest for ultra-compact, light-based circuits, scientists are turning to polaritons—hybrid modes formed from the coupling of light with optically active material excitations such as plasmons or phonons. These remarkable quasiparticles can squeeze light into spaces far smaller than its natural wavelength, overcoming the conventional limits of far-field optics. However, exciting most confined variants - higher-order polaritons - has been a major challenge, as they demand

A team of researchers at the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering has created a new breakthrough in photonics: the design of the first optical device that follows the emerging framework of optical thermodynamics. The work, reported in Nature Photonics, introduces a fundamentally new way of routing light in nonlinear systems—meaning systems that do not require switches, external control, or digital addressing. Instead, light naturally finds its way thro

Since the Generalized Snell's Law (GSL) was proposed, planar metasurfaces have achieved remarkable progress in optical and electromagnetic wavefront manipulation by leveraging phase gradients. The Generalized Snell’s Law primarily focuses on the influence of phase gradients on the fundamental wave components while neglecting higher-order spatial harmonics generated by inter-element coupling and periodicity, often limiting metasurfaces to "single-channel" devices and constrain

Caltech team led by Alireza Marandi, a professor of electrical engineering and applied physics at Caltech, has created a tiny device capable of producing an unusually wide range of laser-light frequencies with ultra-high efficiency—all on a microchip.

Researchers have demonstrated a compact, fully integrated device that uses a carefully crafted mirror to generate a stable frequency comb with very broad bandwidth. The mirror they developed, along with an on-chip measurement platform, offers the scalability and flexibility needed for mass-producible remote sensors and portable spectrometers. This development could enable more accurate environmental monitors that can identify multiple harmful chemicals from trace gases in the

By leveraging the concept of chirality, or the difference of a shape from its mirror image, EPFL scientists have engineered an optical metasurface that controls light to yield a simple and versatile technique for secure encryption, sensing, and computing.

In a groundbreaking experiment, researchers from Tianjin University, Zhejiang University, Northeastern University and University of Science and Technology of China have directly observed anti-Klein tunneling (AKT)—a quantum paradox where chiral particles are entirely reflected instead of passing through an energy barrier. This long-sought quantum-like behavior is realized not with electrons, but with engineered sound waves in a custom-designed bilayer phononic crystal.

MIT researchers have developed a novel AI hardware accelerator that is specifically designed for wireless signal processing. Their optical processor performs machine-learning computations at the speed of light, classifying wireless signals in a matter of nanoseconds.

In their proof-of-concept device, consisting of an array of 20 tunable microresonators, the team demonstrated that each multiplexed microresonator produced high-quality entangled photon pairs as compared to the best resonators they produced in previous work — design elements of the components in that paper have found their way into Cisco Systems’ newly unveiled quantum entanglement chip.

Concentrating light in a volume as small as the wavelength itself is a challenge that is crucial for numerous applications. Researchers from AMOLF, TU Delft, and Cornell University in the USA have demonstrated a new way to focus light on an extremely small scale. Their method utilizes special properties of a photonic crystal and works for a broader spectrum of wavelengths than alternative methods.

Physicists in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have created a compact laser that emits extremely bright, short pulses of light in a useful but difficult-to-achieve wavelength range, packing the performance of larger photonic devices onto a single chip.

A new active metasurface, the electrical-programmable graphene field effect transistor (Gr-FET), from the labs of Sheng Shen and Xu Zhang...