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Dielectric constant of non-fullerene acceptors plays a critical role in organic solar cells in terms of exciton dissociation and charge recombination. Here, authors report selenium substitution on central core of acceptors to improve dielectric constant, realizing devices with efficiency of 19.0%.

’Systems with long coherence times are extremely important for the processing of quantum information. To this end the authors present a system able to cool down a resonator to its quantum mechanical ground state harnessing the large coupling between an ultra-coherent mechanical resonator and a superconducting circuit.’

Nanopatterned materials provide control over mechanical vibrations. This allows for the complete damping of vibrations over more than 5 GHz and for the propagation of hypersonic guided modes at room temperature.

Real-time quantum feedback control can be used to cool quantum systems to their motional ground states, but this has been so far achieved via classical probe fields. Here the authors report feedback cooling of a mechanical oscillator using a squeezed field, reporting higher cooling rate over classical light.

Chaotic behaviour of optomechanical systems has only recently been investigated and observed. Here, Wuet al. study the chaos dynamics in a silicon platform where coupled electron-hole plasma dynamics is possible, providing a route towards chip-scale mesoscopic nonlinear dynamics.

Cavity optomechanics enables measurement of torque at levels unattainable by previous techniques, but the main obstacle to improved sensitivity is thermal noise. Here the authors present cryogenic measurement of a cavity-optomechanical torsional resonator with unprecedented torque sensitivity of 2.9 yNm/√Hz.

A transducer that generates microwave–optical photon pairs is demonstrated. This could provide an interface between optical communication networks and superconducting quantum devices that operate at microwave frequencies.

Dynamic control of components is required for large-scale quantum photonic networks. Here, Kapfingeret al. show dynamic control of the interaction between two coupled photonic crystal nanocavities forming a photonic molecule. Tuning is achieved by using an electrically generated radio frequency surface acoustic wave.

Optical delay is essential to classical and quantum optical communication. Here, the authors realize prolonged optical delay with cascaded of electromagnetically induced transparency by integrating phonon–phonon and optomechanical coupling in a single on-chip device.

Radiation pressure can control the motion of a nanoscale resonator, but pushing this to the quantum limit is difficult because the influence of a single photon is tiny. Here, the authors boost the radiation–pressure interaction by six orders of magnitude using a Josephson junction qubit

Stimulated Brillouin scattering is a non-linear interaction that allows light to be stored as coherent acoustic waves. Here, the authors report on Brillouin scattering-induced transparency in an optical microresonator whose high quality allows for long-lifetime non-reciprocal light storage.

All quantum systems are connected to their environment, and this reduces their quantumness through decoherence. Here, the authors show that the interaction between a macroscale quantum system—a micromechanical oscillator—and its environment leads to non-Markovian Brownian motion

Materials that can alter their structure in response to light have potential as functional materials such as motors and actuators. Here the authors describe a low-cost system capable of rapid, reversible and wavelength-selective responses to light.

Optomechanics is the use of light to control the motion of a mechanical resonator, potentially cooling it to the quantum ground state. Here, the authors cool a millimetre-scale silicon nitride membrane to an effective temperature of 34 microkelvin by coupling it to a three-dimensional microwave cavity.

Cavity optomechanics connects light to the mechanical degrees of freedom of a resonator and has great potential for sensing applications. Here, the authors realize a one-dimensional optomechanical crystal with a complete phononic bandgap containing high Q-factor modes and limited clamping losses.

Vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers consist of an active medium in between two distributed Bragg reflectors. Czerniuk et al.show that the resonant mechanical modes of these periodic structures efficiently modulate the laser emission intensity with frequencies of up to 40 GHz.

Active control of optical fields at the nanoscale is difficult to achieve. Here, the authors fabricate an on-chip graphene NEMS suspended a few tens of nanometres above nitrogen vacancy centres and demonstrate electromechanical control of the photons emitted by electrostatic tuning of the graphene NEMS position.

Light–sound interactions in microcavities are used for optomechanical excitation and cooling, but have previously only been shown in solid-state devices. Here, Bahl et al. generate acoustic oscillations in microfluidic resonators to enable novel optomechanical interactions with liquid-phase materials.

Integrated optomechanical systems can be created by combining semiconductor optoelectronic devices and nanoscale resonators. Here, the authors demonstrate a semiconductor modulation-doped heterostructure-cantilever that achieves efficient optomechanical transduction without the need for an optical cavity.

Optomechanical systems are typically modelled as a single cavity mode coupled to a mechanical oscillator. Here, the authors report on the realization of a multimode optomechanical setup whose distinct features arise from the mechanically induced coupling between the cavity modes.

Typically, phonon trapping is performed using mechanically suspended structures which have many limitations. Here the authors study a phononic structure that supports mechanical bound states in the continuum (BICs) at microwave frequencies with topological features.

A room-temperature demonstration of optomechanical squeezing of light and measurement of mechanical motion approaching the Heisenberg limit using a phononic-engineered membrane-in-the-middle cavity with ultralow noise.

When multiple oscillators are tuned, degeneracies occur on a knot-shaped region in the space of tuning parameters. This knot influences how such systems can be tuned. Here, the authors reconcile two common means for visualizing this influence.

Applications of quantum information processing require distribution of quantum states for linking nodes in networks and mechanical oscillators can create versatile links. Here, the authors describe continuous variable entanglement between two optical modes mediated by a mechanical oscillator.

Carbon nanotube mechanical resonators are difficult to couple optomechanically to microwave fields. Here, the authors exploit Coulomb blockade’s nonlinearity to amplify the single photon coupling between a suspended carbon nanotube quantum dot and a microwave cavity by several orders of magnitude.

Designing reliable and sensitive mechanical sensing technologies based on piezoresistive effect remains a challenge. Here, the authors propose an opto-electro-mechanical coupling strategy to enable giant piezoresistive effect in a highly doped 3C-SiC/Si heterojunction achieving a high GF of 58,000.

Although optomechanics enables precision metrology, measurements beyond mechanical properties often require hybrid devices. Here, Kim et al. demonstrate that a ferromagnetic needle integrated with a torsional resonator can determine the magnetic properties and amplify or cool the resonator motion.

Upconversion nanoparticles, which convert lower-energy light into higher-energy light, have many potential applications including sensing and imaging. Here, Wen et al. review recent advances that have addressed concentration quenching and enabled increasingly bright nanoparticles, opening up their full potential.

Chiral transport can provide robustness against disorder, resulting in improved resonant modes for sensing and metrology. Here, Kim et al. demonstrate chiral phonon transport, disorder suppression and anomalous cooling without damping in an asymmetrically-pumped optomechanical system.

A cavity optomechanics model accounting for the intrinsic dynamics of the interaction between plasmons and molecular vibrations reveals a parametric amplification mechanism that may provide an explanation for features recently observed in nonlinear Raman spectroscopy experiments.

The authors experimentally and theoretically demonstrate stimulated Brillouin scattering in a silicon nanowire supported by a pillar, which results from the tight confinement of both photons and phonons.

A room-temperature motion sensor with record sensitivity is created using a levitating silica nanoparticle. Feedback cooling to reduce the noise arising from Brownian motion enables a detector that is perhaps even sensitive enough to detect non-Newtonian gravity-like forces.

An optomechanical system that converts microwaves to optical frequency light and vice versa is demonstrated. The technique achieves a conversion efficiency of approximately 10%. The results indicate that the device could work at the quantum level, up- and down-converting individual photons, if it were cooled to millikelvin temperatures. It could, therefore, form an integral part of quantum-processor networks.

This Review discusses advances in engineering high-quality-factor strained nanomechanical resonators with applications in precision measurements.

An integrated transducer based on a planar superconducting resonator coupled to a silicon photonic cavity through a mechanical oscillator made from lithium niobate achieves a transduction efficiency of 0.9%.

Strong quadratic coupling between the motion of a membrane and the energy states of a qubit enables the creation of a non-classical energy-squeezed state in the mechanical oscillator.

Achieving low decoherence is challenging in hybrid quantum systems. A superconducting-circuit-based optomechanical platform realizes millisecond-scale quantum state lifetime, which allows tracking of the free evolution of a squeezed mechanical state.

Yongjian Tan and colleagues report a universally applicable real-time polarization compensation method for quantum communications. The approach has several advantages over current methods, including a minimum number of waveplates, faster speed, and wider applicability for various optical links.

A levitated nanosphere that is strongly coupled to an optical cavity mode forms an optomechanical system with three degrees of freedom, which supports hybrid light–mechanical states of a vectorial nature.

Transduction of valley information to mechanical states in a monolayer MoS₂ resonator can be realized by optically pumping the valley carriers and applying an out-of-plane magnetic field gradient to induce a displacement-dependent valley splitting.

An amplitude squeezed light source that operates down to 1 kHz frequencies—the lowest squeezing frequency—is generated in nonlinear crystal-based systems. By injecting the squeezed light into a microresonator, the quantum radiation pressure noise is reduced by 1.2 dB.

Non-magnetic non-reciprocal transparency and amplification is experimentally achieved by optomechanics using a whispering-gallery microresonator. The idea may lead to integrated all-optical isolators or non-reciprocal phase shifters.

Combining micrometre-sized mechanical resonators with superconducting quantum circuits, quantum information encoded with photons now can be converted to the motion of a macroscopic object.

Optomechanical coupling enables an on-chip frequency comb and optical time-lens for 70-fold optical pulse compression.

The thermal vibrations of a carbon nanotube are directly measured in real time with high displacement sensitivity and fine time resolution, revealing dynamics undetected by previous time-averaged measurements.

The observation of spin-dependent lateral displacements of anisotropic and inhomogeneous media with the naked eye is reported, allowing structured light–matter interaction to move from a scientific curiosity to a new asset for the optical manipulation toolbox.

Across platforms, nonreciprocity requires time-reversal symmetry to be broken. Interference of an excitation-preserving and a non-preserving interaction realizes unidirectional transport in a time-reversal-symmetric system.

The authors combined optical traps and frequency combs to create new acoustic technology – a mechanical frequency comb. The generation of this comb does not require any precision control, making it uniquely positioned for sensing, metrology, and quantum technology.

A room-temperature nanomechanical transducer that couples efficiently to both radio waves and light allows radio-frequency signals to be detected as an optical phase shift with quantum-limited sensitivity.

A hybrid nano-optomechanical system — a nanodiamond levitated in an optical dipole trap that contains a single nitrogen vacancy centre — shows the ability to simultaneously control multidimensional optical, phononic and spin degrees of freedom.