NEWS - PHOTONICS

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...

“This is a feat of nanotechnology at the highest level,” said senior author Federico Capasso. “It opens up a new way to structure light...

Researchers develop new design and fabrication method to make lightsails for interstellar travel

Researchers developed a compact, solid-state laser system that generates 193-nm coherent light — the first 193-nm vortex beam

For the first time, researchers have used high-speed laser writing to create lines spaced just 100 nm apart on a glass substrate. The optimi

@ Nano Lett. 2025, 25, 3, 1214-1219, https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.4c06238 Monolayer WS₂ on a graphene support for...