Exploring van der Waals materials with high anisotropy: geometrical and optical approaches.

The emergence of van der Waals (vdW) materials resulted in the discovery of their high optical, mechanical, and electronic anisotropic properties, immediately enabling countless novel phenomena and applications. Such success inspired an intensive search for the highest possible anisotropic properties among vdW materials. Furthermore, the identification of the most promising among the huge family of vdW materials is a challenging quest requiring innovative approaches.

Relativistic quantum key distribution system with one-way quantum communication.

Unambiguous state discrimination (USD) is one of the major obstacles for practical quantum key distribution (QKD). Often overlooked, it allows efficient eavesdropping in majority of practical systems, provided the overall channel loss is above a certain threshold. Thus, to remain secure all such systems must not only monitor the actual loss, but also possess a comprehensive information on the safe 'loss vs.

Physical layer secret key generation for fiber-optical networks.

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a method for generating and sharing a secret key using phase fluctuations in fiber optical links. The obtained key can be readily used to support secure communication between the parties. The security of our approach is based on a fundamental asymmetry associated with the optical physical layer: the sophistication of tools needed by an eavesdropping adversary to subvert the key establishment is significantly greater and more costly than the complexity needed by the legitimate parties to implement the scheme.

A route for fabricating printable photonic devices with sub-10 nm resolution.

A novel and robust route for high-throughput, high-performance nanophotonics-based direct imprint of high refractive index and low visible wavelength absorption materials is presented. Sub-10 nm TiO2 nanostructures are fabricated by low-pressure UV-imprinting of an organic-inorganic resist material. Post-imprint thermal annealing allows optical property tuning over a wide range of values.

Signal beating elimination using single-mode fiber to multimode fiber coupling.

We experimentally demonstrate an all-passive fiber-based approach to prevent undesired beating during signal merging and detection. Beating occurs when optical signals of very close or the same wavelength are combined at a coupler and detected using a photodetector. Our approach is based on signal coupling from several single-mode fibers to a single piece of multimode fiber without interference, such that different signals propagate in different modes with different spatial positions inside the multimode fiber.