Riccardo Sapienza

Nature Reviews Physics, Published online: 06 February 2020; doi:10.1038/s42254-020-0151-2

How can physicists reap the benefits of conferences while reducing their environmental impact? New formats, such as online and multisite conferences, may be part of the solution.

Author(s): Jiteng Sheng, Xinrui Wei, Cheng Yang, and Haibin Wu

The demonstration of synchronization of two mechanical membranes leads to the first experimental optomechanics-based observation of mechanical phase locking, and the realization of a phononic memory.

[Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 053604] Published Wed Feb 05, 2020

Author(s): Fangxing Zhang, Yaming Feng, Xianfeng Chen, Li Ge, and Wenjie Wan

Non-Hermitian systems based on parity-time (PT) and anti-PT symmetry reveal rich physics beyond the Hermitian regime. So far, realizations of such symmetric systems have been limited to the spatial domain. Here we theoretically and experimentally demonstrate synthetic anti-PT symmetry in a spectral ...

[Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 053901] Published Mon Feb 03, 2020

Author(s): V. Bruno, C. DeVault, S. Vezzoli, Z. Kudyshev, T. Huq, S. Mignuzzi, A. Jacassi, S. Saha, Y. D. Shah, S. A. Maier, D. R. S. Cumming, A. Boltasseva, M. Ferrera, M. Clerici, D. Faccio, R. Sapienza, and V. M. Shalaev

A thin film patterned with nanoantennas exhibits negative refraction of light, a useful feature for subwavelength imaging.

[Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 043902] Published Thu Jan 30, 2020

Author(s): Chengshuai Yang, Fengyan Cao, Dalong Qi, Yilin He, Pengpeng Ding, Jiali Yao, Tianqing Jia, Zhenrong Sun, and Shian Zhang

The spatial, temporal, and spectral information in optical imaging play a crucial role in exploring the unknown world and unencrypting natural mysteries. However, the existing optical imaging techniques can only acquire the spatiotemporal or spatiospectral information of the object with the single-s...

[Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 023902] Published Thu Jan 16, 2020

Baptiste Blochet, Kelly Joaquina, Lisa Blum, Laurent Bourdieu, Sylvain Gigan
Focusing scattered light using wavefront shaping provides interesting perspectives from which to image deep in opaque samples, as e.g., in ... [Optica 6, 1554-1561 (2019)]

Xiyuan Lu, Gregory Moille, Anshuman Singh, Qing Li, Daron A. Westly, Ashutosh Rao, Su-Peng Yu, Travis C. Briles, Scott B. Papp, Kartik Srinivasan
The on-chip creation of coherent light at visible wavelengths is crucial to field-level deployment of spectroscopy and metrology systems. ... [Optica 6, 1535-1541 (2019)]

Author(s): Martin Frimmer, Toni L. Heugel, Žiga Nosan, Felix Tebbenjohanns, David Hälg, Abdulkadir Akin, Christian L. Degen, Lukas Novotny, R. Chitra, Oded Zilberberg, and Alexander Eichler

We experimentally demonstrate flipping the phase state of a parametron within a single period of its oscillation. A parametron is a binary logic element based on a driven nonlinear resonator. It features two stable phase states that define an artificial spin. The most basic operation performed on a ...

[Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 254102] Published Thu Dec 19, 2019

Author(s): Zhuojun Liu, Yi Xu, Ye Lin, Jin Xiang, Tianhua Feng, Qitao Cao, Juntao Li, Sheng Lan, and Jin Liu

Sharp electromagnetic resonances play an essential role in physics in general and optics in particular. The last decades have witnessed the successful developments of high-quality (Q) resonances in microcavities operating below the light line, which however is fundamentally challenging to access fro...

[Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 253901] Published Tue Dec 17, 2019

Nature Reviews Physics, Published online: 11 December 2019; doi:10.1038/s42254-019-0136-1

In 2019, new optical phenomena have been revealed in stacks of atomically thin semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides. These effects can be understood in terms of well-known, but also new, exotic, types of exciton.

Author(s): M. Durand, S. M. Popoff, R. Carminati, and A. Goetschy

We prove that optimal control of light energy storage in disordered media can be reached by wave front shaping. For this purpose, we build an operator for dwell times from the scattering matrix and characterize its full eigenvalue distribution both numerically and analytically in the diffusive regim...

[Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 243901] Published Mon Dec 09, 2019

Author(s): S. E. Skipetrov and I. M. Sokolov

Anderson localization does not lead to an exponential decay of intensity of an incident wave with the depth inside a strongly disordered three-dimensional medium. Instead, the average intensity is roughly constant in the first half of a disordered slab, sharply drops in a narrow region in the middle...

[Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 233903] Published Wed Dec 04, 2019

Author(s): Xiaohao Xu and Manuel Nieto-Vesperinas

The momentum of light beams can possess azimuthal densities, circulating around the beam axis and inducing intriguing mechanical effects in local light-matter interaction. Belinfante’s spin momentum loops in circularly polarized beams, while the canonical momentum spirals in helically phased beams. ...

[Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 233902] Published Wed Dec 04, 2019

Author(s): Thorsten S. Rasmussen, Yi Yu, and Jesper Mork

We show that semiconductor Fano lasers strongly suppress dynamic instabilities induced by external optical feedback. A comparison with conventional Fabry-Perot lasers shows orders of magnitude improvement in feedback stability and in many cases even total suppression of coherence collapse, which is ...

[Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 233904] Published Tue Dec 03, 2019

Author(s): Yifan Sun, Sylvain Combrié, Fabien Bretenaker, and Alfredo De Rossi

Mode locking is predicted in a nanolaser cavity forming an effective photonic harmonic potential. The cavity is substantially more compact than a Fabry-Perot resonator with a comparable pulsing period, which is here controlled by the potential. In the limit of instantaneous gain and absorption satur...

[Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 233901] Published Tue Dec 03, 2019

Jason Horng, Yu-Hsun Chou, Tsu-Chi Chang, Chu-Yuan Hsu, Tien-Chang Lu, Hui Deng
The resonance energy and the transition rate of atoms, molecules, and solids were understood as their intrinsic properties in classical ... [Optica 6, 1443-1448 (2019)]

Maxim R. Shcherbakov, Robert Lemasters, Zhiyuan Fan, Jia Song, Tianquan Lian, Hayk Harutyunyan, Gennady Shvets
We demonstrate that rapidly switched high-Q metasurfaces enable spectral regions of negative optical extinction. [Optica 6, 1441-1442 (2019)]

Author(s): J. Lampen, A. Duspayev, H. Nguyen, H. Tamura, P. R. Berman, and A. Kuzmich

An experiment involving a gas of two-level atoms distinguishes between two mechanisms of light-matter interaction: stimulated emission and Hanbury Brown and Twiss interference.

[Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 203603] Published Fri Nov 15, 2019

Author(s): Hasan Yılmaz, Chia Wei Hsu, Arthur Goetschy, Stefan Bittner, Stefan Rotter, Alexey Yamilov, and Hui Cao

The optical memory effect has emerged as a powerful tool for imaging through multiple-scattering media; however, the finite angular range of the memory effect limits the field of view. Here, we demonstrate experimentally that selective coupling of incident light into a high-transmission channel incr...

[Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 203901] Published Tue Nov 12, 2019