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A new approach to control forces and interactions between atoms and molecules, such as those employed by geckos to climb vertical surfaces, could bring advances in new materials for developing quantum light sources.

A newly described property related to the "spin" and momentum of light waves suggests potential practical applications in photonic communications and photonic circuits. Scientists already knew that light waves have an electric field that can rotate as they propagate, which is known as the polarization property of light, and that light waves carry momentum in their direction of motion. In new findings, researchers have discovered a "spin-momentum locking," meaning, for example, light waves that spin in a counterclockwise direction can only move forward, and vice versa.

Researchers at Purdue University have created a quantum spin wave for light. This can be a carrier of information for future nanotechnologies but with a unique twist: they only flow in one direction.

Manufacturers frequently use coatings to protect the structural stability of engines or power generators operating at high temperatures. Ceramic shields, however, have not been able to adequately address a critical, performance-limiting factor: heat radiation. A new ceramic coating from Purdue University acts as a kind of thermal antenna, using light-matter oscillations, or polaritrons, to control the direction and electromagnetic spectrum of thermal radiation.

The gas turbines powering aircraft engines rely on ceramic coatings that ensure structural stability at high temperatures. But these coatings don’t control heat radiation, limiting the performance of the engine. Researchers at Purdue University have engineered ceramic “nanotubes” that behave as thermal antennas, offering control over the spectrum and direction of high-temperature heat radiation.

Congratulations to Fanglin Bao for his new paper in Optics Letters which talks about - Imaging point sources with low angular separation near or below the Rayleigh criterion are important in astronomy, e.g., in the search for habitable exoplanets near stars. However, the measurement time required to...

Over the past three decades, graphene has become the prototypical platform for discovering topological phases of matter. Both the Chern C ε Z and quantum spin Hall ν ε Z 2 insulators were first predicted in graphene, which led to a veritable explosion of research in topological materials. We...

Classical structured light with controlled polarization and orbital angular momentum (OAM) of electromagnetic waves has varied applications in optical trapping, bio-sensing, optical communications, and quantum simulations. However, quantum noise and photon statistics of three-dimensional photonic...