Carbon nanotube mode-locked fiber lasers: recent progress and perspectives
Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) possess remarkable nonlinear optical properties; a particular application is to function as a mode locker used in ultrafast fiber lasers to produce ultrashort optical pulses. Various types of CNT saturable absorbers (SAs) and ultrafast …
In situ charge carrier dynamics of semiconductor nanostructures for advanced photoelectrochemical and photocatalytic applications
Using in situ ultrafast laser spectroscopic techniques to monitor the charge dynamics of semiconductor photocatalysts under operating conditions is essential for digging out the veritable interactions between charge carriers and the reactive species. This …
Ligand-induced chirality and optical activity in semiconductor nanocrystals: theory and applications
Chirality is one of the most fascinating occurrences in the natural world and plays a crucial role in chemistry, biochemistry, pharmacology, and medicine. Chirality has also been envisaged to play an important role in nanotechnology and particularly in …
Nanostructured inorganic electrochromic materials for light applications
Electrochromism, an emerging energy conversion technology, has attracted immense interest due to its various applications including bistable displays, optical filters, variable optical attenuators, optical switches, and energy-efficient smart windows. …
Temporally modulated energy shuffling in highly interconnected nanosystems
Advances in lighting and quantum computing will require new degrees of control over the emission of photons, where localized defects and the quantum confinement of carriers can be utilized. In this contribution, recent developments in the controlled …
Recent advances in fluorescence probes based on carbon dots for sensing and speciation of heavy metals
Heavy metal (HM) pollution is a major global concern. Carbon dots (CDs) have demonstrated unique properties as sensing platforms for HMs detection. This review summarizes the progress made in recent years in fluorescence methods to determine HMs and their …
Large-scale, power-efficient Au/VO2 active metasurfaces for ultrafast optical modulation
Active metasurfaces, in which the optical property of a metasurface device can be controlled by external stimuli, have attracted great research interest recently. For optical switching and modulation applications, high-performance active metasurfaces need to …
Near-zero reflection of all-dielectric structural coloration enabling polarization-sensitive optical encryption with enhanced switchability
Structural coloration using metasurfaces has been steadily researched to overcome the limitations of conventional color printing using pigments by improving the resolution, lowering the toxicity, and increasing the durability. Many metasurfaces have been …
Passive photonic diodes based on natural van der Waals heterostructures
Van der Waals heterostructures are composed of stacked atomically thin two-dimensional (2D) crystals to provide unprecedented functionalities and novel physics. Franckeite, a naturally occurring van der Waals heterostructure consisting of superimposed …
Ultracompact and low-power-consumption silicon thermo-optic switch for high-speed data
Ultracompact and low-power-consumption optical switches are desired for high-performance telecommunication networks and data centers. Here, we demonstrate an on-chip power-efficient 2 × 2 thermo-optic switch unit by using a suspended photonic crystal …
Near-infrared dual-wavelength plasmonic switching and digital metasurface unveiled by plasmonic Fano resonance
Plasmonic Fano resonance (FR) that contributes to multitudinous potential applications in subwavelength nanostructures can facilitate the realization of tunable wavelength selectivity for controlling light–matter interactions in metasurfaces. However, the …
Surface plasmon polariton pulse shaping via two-dimensional Bragg grating pairs
We demonstrate control over the spatial and temporal properties of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) launched from nanohole arrays in silver. The arrays provide wave vector matching to allow the conversion of free-space photons into counter-propagating SPPs. …
Subwavelength sorting of full-color based on anti-Hermitian metasurfaces
Splitting the spectrum of incident light at nanoscale has been of great scientific and practical interest due to its potential application in various optical sensors. For many years, researchers have been striving to realize the full-color sorting of light at …
Surface plasmon polariton–enhanced photoluminescence of monolayer MoS2 on suspended periodic metallic structures
Plasmonic nanostructures have garnered tremendous interest in enhanced light–matter interaction because of their unique capability of extreme field confinement in nanoscale, especially beneficial for boosting the photoluminescence (PL) signals of weak …