Compressing the optical field to the atomic scale opens up possibilities for directly observing individual molecules, offering innovative imaging and research tools for both physical and life sciences. However, the diffraction limit imposes a fundamental constraint on how much the optical field can be compressed, based on the achievable photon momentum. In contrast to dielectric structures, plasmonics offer superior field confinement by coupling the light field with the oscillations of free electrons in metals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMiniaturized lasers play a central role in the infrastructure of modern information society. The breakthrough in laser miniaturization beyond the wavelength scale has opened up new opportunities for a wide range of applications, as well as for investigating light-matter interactions in extreme-optical-field localization and lasing-mode engineering. An ultimate objective of microscale laser research is to develop reconfigurable coherent nanolaser arrays that can simultaneously enhance information capacity and functionality.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSimultaneous localization of light to extreme spatial and spectral scales is of high importance for testing fundamental physics and various applications. However, there is a longstanding trade-off between localizing a light field in space and in frequency. Here we discover a new class of twisted lattice nanocavities based on mode locking in momentum space.
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