Nanophotonics

News and Updates

NIST chip containing a single-photon detector made of superconducting nanowires. Four chips like this were used in the experiment that entangled three photons.

Unity in the Photon Community

September 12, 2023

The creation and detection of single photons (the smallest units of light) has grown in a few decades from an experimental laboratory pursuit to an important

New NIST Licensing Opportunity Teems with Potential Applications

July 5, 2023

Max Planck, one of the Twentieth Century’s most eminent physicists, observed, "An experiment is a question that science poses to Nature, and a measurement is

Jun Ye: A Timely Profile

June 26, 2023

Physicist Jun Ye has a knack for making every second count—literally. At JILA, a joint research institute of the University of Colorado and the National

Projects and Programs

PTIR combines the spatial resolution of AFM with the specificity of absorption spectroscopy

Nano-Chemical Imaging and -Spectroscopy (IR, nIR, VIS)

Ongoing

Conventional techniques for analyzing chemical composition, such as infrared (IR) microscopy often miss critically important nanoscale details. To overcome this

Measuring Light-Matter Interactions in Chip-Based Optical Cavities

Ongoing

Measuring interactions between light and matter has both fundamental and practical importance. For example, lasers have had a profound influence on science and

Nonlinear nanophotonic control of light

Ongoing

Nonlinear optics enables transformation of optical fields through light-matter interactions. These transformations strictly conserve energy and phase-matching

Frequency Conversion Interfaces for Photonic Quantum Systems

Ongoing

Optical frequency conversion, in which the color of light is changed, is a process that has numerous applications in physics and technology. For example, green

Publications

Integrated photonic optomechanical atomic force microscopy probes batch fabricated using deep UV photolithography

June 3, 2023

Author(s)

Diego Perez Morelo, Mingkang Wang, Venkatesh Madhaven, Mogana Sathisivan, Charlie Tay, Vladimir Aksyuk

Chip-scale planar nanofabricated optomechanical devices that optically couple a mechanical moving nanostructure to an on-chip photonic cavity of high quality

Integrating planar photonics for multi-beam generation and atomic clock packaging on chip

April 3, 2023

Author(s)

Chad Ropp, Wenqi Zhu, Alexander Yulaev, Daron Westly, Gregory Simelgor, Akash Rakholia, William Lunden, Dan Sheredy, Martin Boyd, Scott Papp, Amit Agrawal, Vladimir Aksyuk

The commercialization of atomic technologies requires replacing laboratory-scale laser setups with compact and manufacturable optical platforms. Complex

Beating thermal noise in a dynamic signal measurement by a nanofabricated cavity-optomechanical sensor

March 15, 2023

Author(s)

Mingkang Wang, Diego Perez Morelo, Georg Ramer, Georges Pavlidis, Jeffrey Schwartz, Liya Yu, Robert Ilic, Andrea Centrone, Vladimir Aksyuk

Thermal fluctuations often impose both fundamental and practical measurement limits on high-performance sensors, motivating the development of techniques that

Ultra-low loss quantum photonic circuits integrated with single quantum emitters

December 12, 2022

Author(s)

Ashish Chanana, Hugo Larocque, Renan Moreira, Jacques Carolan, Biswarup Guha, Emerson Goncalves De Melo, Vikas Anant, Jin Dong Song, Dirk Englund, Daniel Blumenthal, Marcelo Davanco, Kartik Srinivasan

Photon-based photonic quantum information systems require both scalable ultra-low loss photonic circuits and high-flux sources of single-photons. Direct

Tools and Instruments

Sample Preparation and Metrology Tools

Read about our sample preparation and metrology tools.

Awards

Kartik Srinivasan Elected OSA Fellow

Kartik Srinivasan of NIST’s Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology (CNST) was elected Fellow of the Optical Society (OSA). Dr