Volume 18 Issue 5, May 2024

Andrew M. Weiner, a luminary in ultrafast optics and quantum photonics passed away on February 13, 2024, at the age of 65. He will be remembered for his profound contributions to the optics and photonics community, engineering, education, and for his devoted mentorship. He leaves behind a legacy of innovation and inspiration.

Holographic waveguides using shallow etching of silicon-on-insulator waveguides makes designing integrated, preset optical vector matrix multiplication computationally tractable and commercially available.

Manipulating extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light is notoriously challenging owing to the lack of efficient light modulators. Quantum materials with properties controllable by light may provide an answer.

Sub-cycle confinement and control of phase transitions in strongly correlated materials are theoretically demonstrated, potentially providing a way to investigate electron dynamics on timescales previously unattainable with these materials.

Photonics West 2024 showcases a robust and growing photonics industry, as the field of silicon photonics works towards sustainable growth.

This Review discusses the physics of nonreciprocal radiation and Kirchhoff’s law generalization in the context of nanophotonics-enabled nonreciprocal thermal applications.

Addition of a multifunctional ionic additive in mixed two-dimensional–three-dimensional bromide/chloride perovskites enables efficient blue perovskite LEDs with external quantum efficiency of up to 21.4% and half-lifetime of 129 min at an initial luminance of 100 cd m^–2.

Nonlinear multidimensional spectroscopy that can image the sub-cycle dynamics of strongly correlated systems on the sub-femtosecond timescale is demonstrated by using the carrier–envelope-phase dependence of the correlated multielectron response to decode the complex interplay between different many-body states.

Researchers demonstrate a size-dependent lanthanide energy transfer effect in upconversion nanoparticles with depleted surface quenching, resulting in upconversion quantum yields of 13.0 ± 1.3%.

Controlling the doping depth in perovskites allows the creation of a depletion region that inhibits the migration of iodide ions under illumination. Solar cells exhibit a power conversion efficiency of 24.6% and maintain 88% of the initial efficiency after 1,900 h of continuous operation.

A reflective spatial light modulator for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) or soft X-ray light is demonstrated in an electronic Wigner crystal material with a sub-90-nm feature size. The diffraction grating imprinted by sub-picosecond EUV beams is rewritable. The projected efficiency according to the modelling exceeds 1%.

Two precursor additives improve the performance of tin-based perovskite solar cells, delivering a power conversion efficiency of 15.38% and maintaining 93% of the initial efficiency after 500 h of continuous illumination.

Conformal transformation optics is exploited to design curved accelerating waveguides with spatially gradient curvatures to boost the nonlinear efficiency and broaden the bandwidth of the nonlinear optical processes in the waveguides.

Super-resolution pMINFLUX microscopy is combined with FRET and enables co-tracking of two fluorophores without photoswitching.

An integrated high-energy laser that combines a passively Q-switched laser cavity based on a silicon-nitride photonic integrated circuit with an optically pumped gain layer consisting of thulium-doped alumina is reported, representing a pivotal advancement in integrated pulsed lasers.

A wireless optoelectronic probe integrates a microscale light-emitting diode and a photodetector coated with oxygen-sensitive dyes to monitor the partial pressure of oxygen in the deep brain of freely moving mice.

Using inverse design, a 3D silicon photonics platform that can be used for the mathematical operation of vector–matrix multiplication with light is demonstrated, potentially enabling large-scale wave-based analogue computing.

Free-electron homodyne detection allows measuring phase-resolved optical responses in electron microscopy, demonstrated in the imaging of plasmonic fields with few-nanometre spatial and sub-cycle temporal resolutions.

Molecular perdeuteration of thermally activated delayed fluorescence emitters improves the performance of blue organic light-emitting diodes, enabling a peak external quantum efficiency of 33.1% and a device lifetime to reach 80% of initial luminance of over 1,300 h.