Low-dimensional saturable absorbers for ultrafast photonics in solid-state bulk lasers: status and prospects
Low-dimensional (LD) materials have originated a range of innovative applications in photonics and optoelectronics owning to their advantages of ultrafast carrier response and distinct nonlinear saturable absorption properties. In particular, these emerging …
Recent progress on applications of 2D material-decorated microfiber photonic devices in pulse shaping and all-optical signal processing
Due to the exotic electronic and optical properties, two-dimensional (2D) materials, such as graphene, topological insulators, transition metal dichalcogenides, black phosphorus, MXenes, graphitic carbon nitride, metal-organic frameworks, and so on, have …
Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors for quantum information
The superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (SNSPD) is a quantum-limit superconducting optical detector based on the Cooper-pair breaking effect by a single photon, which exhibits a higher detection efficiency, lower dark count rate, higher counting …
Light-field and spin-orbit-driven currents in van der Waals materials
This review aims to provide an overview over recent developments of light-driven currents with a focus on their application to layered van der Waals materials. In topological and spin-orbit dominated van der Waals materials helicity-driven and …
Active photonic platforms for the mid-infrared to the THz regime using spintronic structures
Spintronics and Photonics constitute separately two disciplines of huge scientific and technological impact. Exploring their conceptual and practical overlap offers vast possibilities of research and a clear scope for the corresponding communities to merge …
Dynamics of carbon nanotube-based mode-locking fiber lasers
Carbon nanotube (CNT) can work as excellent saturable absorber (SA) due to its advantages of fast recovery, low saturation intensity, polarization insensitivity, deep modulation depth, broad operation bandwidth, outstanding environmental stability, and …
164 fs mode-locked erbium-doped fiber laser based on tungsten ditelluride
In recent years, the diversity of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) has made them occupy the essential status in the exploration of saturable absorbing materials. WTe2, also an important member of TMDs not only exhibits narrower band gap than MoS2 or …
Convolution operations on time-domain digital coding metasurface for beam manipulations of harmonics
Time-domain digital coding metasurfaces have been proposed recently to achieve efficient frequency conversion and harmonic control simultaneously; they show considerable potential for a broad range of electromagnetic applications such as wireless …
Tellurene-based saturable absorber to demonstrate large-energy dissipative soliton and noise-like pulse generations
Two-dimensional layered monoelemental materials (Xenes) with excellent optoelectronic properties have various property-related applications, such as energy, biomedicine, and optoelectronic devices. Xenes also show excellent performance in acting as saturable …
Controllable all-optical modulation speed in hybrid silicon-germanium devices utilizing the electromagnetically induced transparency effect
Incorporating auxiliary all-optical modulation speeds as optional response modes into a single metamaterial is a promising research route towards advanced terahertz (THz) applications ranging from spectroscopy and sensing to communications. Particularly, a …
Simultaneous field enhancement and loss inhibition based on surface plasmon polariton mode hybridization
In common plasmonic configurations, energy loss and field enhancement are mutually restricted. In a vast majority of cases, high confinement goes together with high loss, which is a serious limitation for some applications. In an attempt of breaking this …
Robust optical physical unclonable function using disordered photonic integrated circuits
Physical unclonable function (PUF) has emerged as a promising and important security primitive for use in modern systems and devices, due to their increasingly embedded, distributed, unsupervised, and physically exposed nature. However, optical PUFs based on …
Broadband and high-efficiency accelerating beam generation by dielectric catenary metasurfaces
Self-accelerating beams show considerable captivating phenomena and applications owing to their transverse acceleration, diffraction-free and self-healing properties in free space. Metasurfaces consisting of dielectric or metallic subwavelength structures …
Broadband photonic topological insulator based on triangular-holes array with higher energy filling efficiency
Photonic topological insulators (PTIs) bring markedly new opportunities to photonic devices with low dissipation and directional transmission of signal over a wide wavelength range due to the broadband topological protection. However, the maximum gap/mid-gap …
3D super-resolved imaging in live cells using sub-diffractive plasmonic localization of hybrid nanopillar arrays
Analysing dynamics of a single biomolecule using high-resolution imaging techniques has been had significant attentions to understand complex biological system. Among the many approaches, vertical nanopillar arrays in contact with the inside of cells have …
Real-time terahertz meta-cryptography using polarization-multiplexed graphene-based computer-generated holograms
As one of the cutting-edge technologies in advanced information science, wave-based cryptography is a prerequisite to enable a plethora of secure encrypting platforms which can be realized by smart multiplexing techniques together with suitable metasurface …
Thermal-responsive multicolor emission of single NaGdF4:Yb/Ce/Ho upconversion nanocrystals for anticounterfeiting application
This study presents a novel and high-level anticounterfeiting strategy based on Ce/Yb/Ho triply-doped NaGdF4 nanocrystals with temperature-responsive multicolor emission. A critical factor leading to the multicolor emission is confirmed by comparing the …
Yttrium oxide as a Q-switcher for the near-infrared erbium-doped fiber laser
Yttrium oxide (Y2O3) has been widely used in metal-reinforced composites, microelectronics, waveguide lasers, and high-temperature protective coatings because of its good physical and photoelectric properties. However, few studies have been done on the …
High-quality micropattern printing by interlacing-pattern holographic femtosecond pulses
To improve the efficiency of femtosecond laser direct writing, holographic femtosecond laser patterning using spatial light modulators has been widely used for the processing of micro/nanopatterns. However, the speckle noise of modulated optical fields …
End-emitting nano organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) with directional output
Thin-film organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) have multifold advantages over their inorganic counterparts, which is mainly based on the molecular materials and the flexible device performances. However, due to the low mobility of the charge carriers, OLEDs …
Multiphysical sensing of light, sound and microwave in a microcavity Brillouin laser
Light, sound, and microwave are important tools for many interdisciplinary applications in a multi-physical environment, and they usually are inefficient to be detected simultaneously in the same physical platform. However, at the microscopic scale, these …
Ultra-wideband enhancement on mid-infrared fingerprint sensing for 2D materials and analytes of monolayers by a metagrating
Mid-infrared absorption spectroscopy is a powerful tool to identify analytes by detecting their material fingerprint in a label-free way, but it faces barriers on trace-amount analysis due to the difficulties in enhancing the broadband spectral signals. Here, …
Microcavity-coupled emitters in hexagonal boron nitride
Integration of quantum emitters in photonic structures is an important step in the broader quest to generate and manipulate on-demand single photons via compact solid-state devices. Unfortunately, implementations relying on material platforms that also serve …
Exploiting deep learning network in optical chirality tuning and manipulation of diffractive chiral metamaterials
Deep-learning (DL) network has emerged as an important prototyping technology for the advancements of big data analytics, intelligent systems, biochemistry, physics, and nanoscience. Here, we used a DL model whose key algorithm relies on deep neural network …
Time-varying optical vortices enabled by time-modulated metasurfaces
In this paper, generation of optical vortices with time-varying orbital angular momentum (OAM) and topological charge is theoretically demonstrated based on time-modulated metasurfaces with a linearly azimuthal frequency gradient. The topological charge of …
Direct routing of intensity-editable multi-beams by dual geometric phase interference in metasurface
Controlling spin electromagnetic waves by ultra-thin Pancharatnam-Berry (PB) metasurfaces show promising prospects in the optical and wireless communications. One of the major challenge is to precisely control over the complex wavefronts and spatial power …
Fabrication of highly uniform nanoprobe via the automated process for tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy
In a tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (TERS) system, using a sharp nanotip that comprises a noble metal is critical to attaining high spatial resolution and highly enhanced Raman scattering. A strongly acidic solution is typically used to fabricate gold …
Ultra-thin curved visible microdisk lasers with three-dimensional whispering gallery modes
Microdisk lasers are important components in photonic integrated circuits (PICs), of which the whispering gallery modes (WGMs) are usually confined within a two-dimensional (2D) planar slab. Here, owing to the strain relaxation of quantum wells by wet-etching …
Spatial multiplexing holographic combiner for glasses-free augmented reality
Glasses-free augmented reality is of great interest by fusing virtual 3D images naturally with physical world without the aid of any wearable equipment. Here we propose a large-scale spatial multiplexing holographic see-through combiner for full-color 3D …
Terahertz plasmonic phase-jump manipulator for liquid sensing
Terahertz (THz) plasmonic sensors has been regarded as exciting advances in biomedical engineering, due to their real-time, label-free, and ultrasensitive monitoring features. But actually, its widespread application remains impeded by poor modulation …
Facile sonochemical-assisted synthesis of orthorhombic phase black phosphorus/rGO hybrids for effective photothermal therapy
Two-dimensional black phosphorus (BP) has been demonstrated to be promising in photoelectronic devices, electrode materials, and biomedicine owing to its outstanding properties. However, the application of BP has been hindered by harsh preparation conditions, …
Facile integration of MoS2/SiC photodetector by direct chemical vapor deposition
The MoS2 photodetector on different substrates stacked via van der Waals force has been explored extensively because of its great potential in optoelectronics. Here, we integrate multilayer MoS2 on monocrystalline SiC substrate though direct chemical vapor …