Optics and photonics articles from across Nature Portfolio

When driven by nonclassical light, photoemission from a needle tip reveals signatures of strong-field physics, opening up opportunities to control matter and to engineer the building blocks of quantum technologies.

It is challenging to generate ultrashort laser pulses at high powers, but repeatedly overlapping light pulses in a crystal can efficiently amplify a weak signal.

Photon sources used in quantum optics are limited in ways that free electron sources may not be. Now, accelerated electrons have been shown to generate non-classical light — this opens up possibilities for quantum experiments at the nanoscale.

Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor-integrated silicon photonics offers a scalable path to high-bandwidth, low-energy optical interconnects for data centres and artificial intelligence/high-performance computing. This Review surveys device maturity, multimaterial and 3D integration, electronics co-design and packaging trends and maps a path towards comb-enabled dense wavelength-division multiplexing, petabit bandwidth and sub-picojoule per bit efficiency.

Optical force emerges when photons change momentum while altering their propagation direction inside curved optical waveguides. The authors demonstrate significant deformation of flexible waveguides induced by the forces exerted by guided light.

The authors develop a handheld opto-US probe that integrates a transparent ultrasound transducer array for real-time ultrasound, photoacoustic, and fluorescence imaging, enabling non-invasive structural, molecular, and functional diagnosis in clinics.

The hybrid behavior of strongly interacting light and matter in cavities can be engineered by tailoring the cavity parameters, but simulating such systems is hard due to the complexity of the matter and quantum light. In this work, the authors derive an effective ab-initio theory reducing the light description to a single degree of freedom while ensuring finite light-matter coupling even in macroscopic systems.

When driven by nonclassical light, photoemission from a needle tip reveals signatures of strong-field physics, opening up opportunities to control matter and to engineer the building blocks of quantum technologies.

It is challenging to generate ultrashort laser pulses at high powers, but repeatedly overlapping light pulses in a crystal can efficiently amplify a weak signal.

John ‘JJ’ Joannopoulos, a pioneering condensed-matter theorist who contributed to the launch of modern nanophotonics and mentored a plethora of scientists and engineers, passed away on 17 August 2025, aged 78. In his five decades at MIT, JJ combined first-principles insights with a gift for nurturing people, shaping fields from ab initio materials theory to photonic crystals and their applications.

Tony Kenyon, the director of the Neuroware Innovation and Knowledge Centre (IKC), introduces the UK’s first IKC in neuromorphic (brain-inspired) computing hardware — its goals, structure and the broader vision for brain-inspired technologies.

Sergei Turitsyn, the director of the UK Multidisciplinary Centre for Neuromorphic Computing, introduces the UK’s first multidisciplinary centre dedicated to advancing brain-inspired, energy-efficient computing to address sustainability challenges.