Issue 12 (2022)

Recent advances in optical label-free characterization of extracellular vesicles

Recent advances in optical label-free characterization of extracellular vesicles

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are complex biological nanoparticles endogenously secreted by all eukaryotic cells. EVs carry a specific molecular cargo of proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids derived from cells of origin and play a significant role in the …

Data-driven concurrent nanostructure optimization based on conditional generative adversarial networks

Data-driven concurrent nanostructure optimization based on conditional generative adversarial networks

Iterative numerical optimization is a ubiquitous tool to design optical nanostructures. However, there can be a significant performance gap between the numerically simulated results, with pristine shapes, and the experimentally measured values, with deformed …

Synergistic double laser beam-boosted liquid-NIR-SERS for ultralow detection of non-adsorptive polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in lake water

Synergistic double laser beam-boosted liquid-NIR-SERS for ultralow detection of non-adsorptive polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in lake water

Ultrasensitive trace-detection of toxic and carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) can ceaselessly propel the environmental surveillance in aqueous ecosystems. Due to the intrinsic nonadsorptive feature of PAHs, the promising technique of …

Full-color generation enabled by refractory plasmonic crystals

Full-color generation enabled by refractory plasmonic crystals

Plasmonic structural color, in which vivid colors are generated via resonant nanostructures made of common plasmonic materials, such as noble metals have fueled worldwide interest in backlight-free displays. However, plasmonic colors that were withstanding …

Free-space-coupled wavelength-scale disk resonators

Free-space-coupled wavelength-scale disk resonators

Optical microresonators with low quality factor ( Q $Q$ ) can be efficiently excited by and scatter freely propagating optical waves, but those with high Q $Q$ typically cannot. Here, we present a universal model for resonators interacting with freely …

Topologically driven Rabi-oscillating interference dislocation

Topologically driven Rabi-oscillating interference dislocation

Quantum vortices are the quantized version of classical vortices. Their center is a phase singularity or vortex core around which the flow of particles as a whole circulates and is typical in superfluids, condensates and optical fields. However, the …

End-to-end design of metasurface-based complex-amplitude holograms by physics-driven deep neural networks

End-to-end design of metasurface-based complex-amplitude holograms by physics-driven deep neural networks

Holograms which reconstruct the transverse profile of light with complex-amplitude information have demonstrated more excellent performances with an improved signal-to-noise ratio compared with those containing amplitude-only and phase-only information. …

Broadband nonlinear optical modulator enabled by VO_2/V_2/O_2 core–shell heterostructures

Broadband nonlinear optical modulator enabled by VO_2/V_2/O_2 core–shell heterostructures

Broadband pulsed lasers have become an indispensable part in optical communications, biomedical engineering, materials processing, and national defense. Inspired by the broadband and ultrafast optical components, great efforts from the laser and material …

Gigahertz femtosecond laser-by a novel asymmetric one-dimensional photonic crystal saturable absorber device with defect layer

Gigahertz femtosecond laser-by a novel asymmetric one-dimensional photonic crystal saturable absorber device with defect layer

High repetition frequency (HRF) ultrashort pulse fiber laser has been widely used in laser cold processing. The technical solutions such as short cavity length fiber laser have been proposed to achieve HRF ultrashort pulse output recently. However, the …

Ultralow loss visible light metamaterials assembled by metaclusters

Ultralow loss visible light metamaterials assembled by metaclusters

Optical metamaterials give birth to the control and regulation of light. However, because of strong energy dissipation and fabrication difficulty in meta-atoms, low-loss isotropic three dimensional negative index metamaterials (NIMs) in the visible spectrum …

Designing high-efficiency extended depth-of-focus metalens via topology-shape optimization

Designing high-efficiency extended depth-of-focus metalens via topology-shape optimization

Longitudinal optical field modulation is of critical importance in a wide range of applications, including optical imaging, spectroscopy, and optical manipulation. However, it remains a considerable challenge to realize a uniformly distributed light field …

Multitask bidirectional digital coding metasurface for independent controls of multiband and full-space electromagnetic waves

Multitask bidirectional digital coding metasurface for independent controls of multiband and full-space electromagnetic waves

Full-space metasurfaces demonstrate powerful abilities in manipulating electromagnetic (EM) waves, but most of them are usually single band. Here, a multiband bidirectional digital coding metasurface is proposed for multiple tasks, which can achieve …