Photonics

Physicists built a photonic quantum heat engine that uses indefinite causal order to generate work and refrigeration simultaneously, reversing the everyday direction of heat flow.

Osaka Metropolitan University researchers built a magneto-optical, phase-change metagrating that decouples heat absorption from emission and retains its state without power.

Nokia will spend about $30 million to grow its Allentown, Pennsylvania test and packaging site up to tenfold, backed by state aid and a federal CHIPS tax credit.

A Mamyshev oscillator on an erbium-doped silicon nitride chip delivers 1.05 nJ pulses as short as 147 fs, matching tabletop femtosecond lasers.

A Monash University team reports in Nature Photonics the first integrated chip that can create, route, and read information carried in light's 'valley' degree of freedom.

Teams at Imperial College London, University of Michigan, and Tufts University transformed natural silk threads into plastic-like materials that outperform metal alloys, resist punctures like carbon-fiber composites, and polarize terahertz light for potential 6G telecommunications use.

University of Pennsylvania researchers demonstrated strongly nonlinear exciton-polaritons that switch optical signals at 4 femtojoules—a record low for 2D polariton systems—using a MoSe₂ monolayer inside a photonic crystal nanocavity.

A PNAS paper from XPANCEO and Nobel laureate Konstantin Novoselov shows the van der Waals crystal As2S3 undergoes a refractive-index shift of 0.3 and expands up to 7% under ordinary light, enough to write 50,000-dpi patterns without lithography.

A Nature Communications study shows engineered disorder can let one metasurface handle broadband focusing and single-shot polarimetry.

Researchers combine amplitude, phase, and polarization in a single holographic data page, using a neural network to decode all three channels from intensity-only measurements.

NVIDIA pours $2 billion each into photonics makers Lumentum and Coherent, signaling that optical interconnects are becoming as critical to AI scaling as GPUs.