Materials for optics articles from across Nature Portfolio

A hollow-core optical fibre which surpasses silica fibre’s long-standing limits and provides an attenuation below 0.1 dB/km across a record-wide bandwidth, could yield more energy-efficient communications with lower latency and higher data capacity.

A plasmonic printing technology is developed to enable rapid, room-temperature, scalable fabrication of all-metal oxide thin-film transistors and circuits.

A room-temperature double-layer WS₂ microcavity is used to explore spin anisotropy and tune it with interlayer spacing.

The photoelectric conversion efficiency of bulk photovoltaic devices has been limited by open circuit voltages or short circuit current densities. Here, authors construct a 2D in-plane device based on ferroelectric NbOBr₂ to improve photovoltaic performance and achieve a device efficiency of 1.25%.

Heterostructures of segmented semiconductor materials are difficult to produce by sequential epitaxial nucleation. Here, the authors report on the spontaneous formation of 1D heterostructures with numerous fluorescent stripe patterns following an assembly strategy based on Plateau-Rayleigh instability.

A lightweight and high-strength Ti₃C₂T_x aerogel is prepared by air-drying methods for multi-spatiotemporal infrared information management.

A hollow-core optical fibre which surpasses silica fibre’s long-standing limits and provides an attenuation below 0.1 dB/km across a record-wide bandwidth, could yield more energy-efficient communications with lower latency and higher data capacity.

An article in Nature Communications presents an irregular growth strategy that generates disordered architected materials with excellent static mechanical cloaking and camouflage capabilities.

A plasmonic printing technology is developed to enable rapid, room-temperature, scalable fabrication of all-metal oxide thin-film transistors and circuits.

Terahertz technology has the potential to push the speed limit of future opto-electronic applications, but the large free-space wavelength of terahertz light hinders nanoscale device implementation. Now, the confinement of terahertz light to the nanometre scale is demonstrated using phonon polaritons in hafnium-based van der Waals crystals.

A simple physical model based on electronic interactions between excited configurations enables the quick and reliable prediction of singlet–triplet energy gaps in polycyclic heteroaromatic emitters. Guided by this model, organic emitters with small singlet–triplet energy gaps can be designed for applications in organic light-emitting diodes with high efficiency and colour purity.

Guiding light is an essential task in optics, from optical fibres to compact nanoscale systems. Here, a few-atoms-thin MoTe₂ layer embedded into a planar waveguide emits photons into waveguide modes that propagate coherently, paving the way for waveguide quantum electrodynamics with van der Waals materials.