Trending Papers in optics

3D printing technology sparks a paradigm shift in one-step production, mass customization, and waste minimization. Of late, tremendous advances have been made in 3D printing research, including electronic components, energy-storage gadgets, and medical therapeutic widgets. Lasers with enormous applicable values, ranging from information communication, to health treatment, to industrial manufacturing, have pervasively penetrated and significantly contributed to modern society. However, until now, the platform of 3D printed lasers is absent in all published work. Here, 3D printing technique endowed with great versatility and accessibility allows the possibility to export any desired laser item free from geometrical restraints, constitutional constraints, and skill limitations. Furthermore, based on the biodissolvability, biodegradability, and biocompatibility of the filament, customized 3D printed random laser devices for speckle-free bioimaging and large-scale phototherapy are constructed to investigate inherent multistructures and multifunctional biological systems, providing an excellent solution for intriguing yet challenging issues from extremely complicated groups. It is envisioned that 3D printed random lasers will pave the way for a series of long-anticipated proofs of concept, such as full-field imaging implants, microfluidic laser sensors, and photonic circuit systems.

Satellite-based quantum technologies represent a possible route for extendingthe achievable range of quantum communication, allowing the construction ofworldwide quantum networks without quantum repeaters. In space missions,however, the volume available for the instrumentation is limited, and footprintis a crucial specification of the devices that can be employed. Integratedoptics could be highly beneficial in this sense, as it allows for theminiaturization of different functionalities in small and monolithic photoniccircuits. In this work, we report on the qualification of waveguides fabricatedin glass by femtosecond laser micromachining for their use in a low Earth orbitspace environment. In particular, we exposed different laser written integrateddevices, such as straight waveguides, directional couplers, and Mach-Zehnderinterferometers, to suitable proton and $\gamma$-ray irradiation. Ourexperiments show that no significant changes have been induced to theircharacteristics and performances by the radiation exposure. Our results,combined with the high compatibility of laser-written optical circuits toquantum communication applications, pave the way for the use of laser-writtenintegrated photonic components in future satellite missions.

Second harmonic generation (SHG) with a material of large transparency is anattractive way of generating coherent light sources at exotic wavelength rangesuch as VUV, UV and visible light. It is of critical importance to improvenonlinear conversion efficiency in order to find practical applications inquantum light source and high resolution nonlinear microscopy, etc. Here anenhanced SHG with conversion efficiency up to the order of 0.01% at SHwavelength of 282 nm under 11 GW/cm2 pump power via the excitation of anapolein lithium niobite (LiNbO3, or LN) nanodisk through the dominating d33nonlinear coefficient is investigated. The anapole has advantages of stronglysuppressing far-field scattering and well-confined internal field which helpsto boost the nonlinear conversion. Anapoles in LN nanodisk is facilitated byhigh index contrast between LN and substrate with properties of near-zero-indexvia hyperbolic metamaterial structure design. By tailoring the multi-layersstructure of hyperbolic metamaterials, the anapole excitation wavelength can betuned at different wavelengths. It indicates that an enhanced SHG can beachieved at a wide range of pump light wavelengths via different design of theepsilon-near-zero (ENZ) hyperbolic metamaterials substrates. The proposednanostructure in this work might hold significances for the enhancedlight-matter interactions at the nanoscale such as integrated optics.

Working with finite numbers of modes to describe, generate and detect opticalfields can be both mathematically economical and physically useful. Such amodal basis can map directly to various applications in communications, sensingand processing. But, we need a way to generate and analyze such fields,including measurement and control of both the relative amplitudes and phases ofthe modal components. Here, we show first how to measure all those relativeamplitudes and phases automatically and simultaneously. The method uses aself-configuring network of 2x2 blocks, such as integrated Mach-Zehnderinterferometers, that can automatically align itself to the optical field by asequence of simple one-parameter power minimizations when network elements,such as phase shifters, are adjusted. The optical field is then directlydeduced from the resulting settings of those elements. We show how the entirenetwork can be calibrated for such measurements, automatically and with justtwo light beams. Then, using the same calibration and running the meshbackwards, we can also controllably generate an arbitrary multimode field.Explicit algorithms and formulas are given for operating this system.

Here a detailed formalism to achieve an analytical solution of a lossy highpower Yb-doped silica fiber laser is introduced. The solutions for the losslessfiber laser is initially attained in detail. Next, the solution for the lossyfiber laser is obtained based on the lossless fiber laser solution. To examinethe solutions for both lossless and lossy fiber laser two sets of values arecompared with the exact numerical solutions and the results are in a goodagreement. Furthermore, steps and procedures for achieving the final solutionsare explained clearly and precisely.

Squeezed states are a primary resource for continuous-variable (CV) quantuminformation processing. To implement CV protocols in a scalable and robust way,it is desirable to generate and manipulate squeezed states using an integratedphotonics platform. In this paper, we demonstrate the generation ofquadrature-phase squeezed states measured in the radio-frequency carriersideband using a small-footprint silicon-nitride microresonator with adual-pumped four-wave-mixing process. We record a squeezed noise level of 1.34dB ($\pm$ 0.16 dB) below the photocurrent shot noise, which corresponds to 3.1dB ($\pm$ 0.5 dB) of quadrature squeezing on chip. We also show that it iscritical to account for the nonlinear behavior of the pump fields to properlypredict the squeezing that can be generated in this system. This technologypaves the way for creating and manipulating large scale CV cluster states thatcan be used for quantum information applications including universal quantumcomputing.