Physical optics principles such as interference, diffraction, polarization, and Fresnel equations, and their manifestation in real-world problems.
Researchers have observed strong coupling between light waves and traveling acoustic waves in optical fiber for the first time, opening a new platform for optoacoustic signal processing.
Researchers at the University of Jena and the University of Regensburg have used ultrashort laser pulses and nonlinear optical methods to probe the quantum geometric properties of electrons in solids.
Researchers constructed optical skyrmions using two orthogonally polarized Laguerre-Gaussian beams and showed that they can control the motion of magnetic skyrmions in magnetic materials, using the orbital and spin angular momentum of structured light to manipulate magnetic structures.
A paper published online in Nature Photonics on October 13 finds that nonlinear high-harmonic circular dichroism can be used to reveal local Berry curvature in crystals with broken time-reversal symmetry.
Nature Photonics published a paper online on October 9 in which researchers modulated population transfer in helium atoms from the ground state to the metastable state by controlling the phase of interfering stimulated Raman pathways in the extreme ultraviolet (XUV) region.
Engineers at the University of California, San Diego demonstrated a new method for switching magnetic information in a material using specially designed ultrafast laser beams, without an external magnetic field.
Why we recommend it: The original article demonstrates the use of structured light in all-optical magnetic storage, relevant to light-controlled magnetic recording
A Nature Communications paper uses wavefront shaping to focus light through a scattering medium onto multiple target points, revealing giant fluctuations in focused intensity and using them to uncover hidden correlations in opaque materials.
Researchers use a programmable photonic chip to read out the hidden topology of a lossy system: two signal channels reproduce the lossy system, while two auxiliary channels absorb leaked energy, allowing topological properties to be measured even under energy loss.
Earlier studies in hydrogel and water droplet experiments proposed a photomolecular effect in which visible light illumination accelerates water evaporation. New rigorous experiments find this claim to be inaccurate.
Researchers used an interferometer to split a laser into two beams of different colors and overlapped them in a vacuum chamber to form a 3D light field, which was used to manipulate electrons and drive them into quantum states that had previously been inaccessible experimentally.
Researchers at the Joint Laboratory for High Power Laser Physics at the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics studied the internal dynamics of spatiotemporal optical vortex strings, uncovering phenomena such as spatiotemporal attraction and filamentation stretching. The results were published as "Probing Internal Dynamics of Spatiotemporal Optical Vortex Strings".
A team from the State Key Laboratory of Ultra-Intense Laser Science and Technology at the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOM) achieved, for the first time, all-optical arbitrary control of chirality and ellipticity in solid-state high harmonics through dynamical symmetry engineering and quantum geometric phase manipulation.
Why we recommend it: The original article presents an all-optical means of controlling solid-state high-harmonic polarization, relevant to circularly polarized attosecond light sources
A team led by Researcher Li Wei at the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics published a paper in Science Advances proposing long-wave transparent low-emissivity all-dielectric materials (LLM) that achieve mid-infrared reflection through Mie scattering by infrared-transparent dielectric microparticles such as NaCl, avoiding the attenuation of wireless signals caused by metals.
A team led by Associate Researcher Luo Jing at the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics published a paper in Optics and Lasers in Engineering using the low-frequency polarization aberration produced by plane mirrors in non-parallel optical paths to compensate for the polarization aberration of the optical system itself. In design verification of a typical off-axis three-mirror system, adding a plane mirror and adjusting its pose reduced the system's polarization aberration to 1/15 of its original value, with the full-field average phase retardance dropping from 0.0759 rad to 0.0050 rad, while wavefront aberration and optical efficiency were essentially unaffected.
A spatial light modulator (SLM) uses liquid crystal materials driven electrically to change the amplitude, phase or polarization state of light waves, modulating the spatial distribution of a beam. Amplitude SLMs use TN and VA modes, phase SLMs use ECB mode, and reflective optical paths generally require an oblique incidence angle of less than 5°. The device has been used in 3D printing and lithography, super-resolution microscopy, holographic imaging and atmospheric turbulence simulation.