Photonics

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.