We introduce the first plasmonic palette utilizing color generation strategies for photorealistic printing with aluminum nanostructures. Our work expands the visible color space through spatially mixing and adjusting the nanoscale spacing of discrete nanostructures. With aluminum as the plasmonic material, we achieved enhanced durability and dramatically reduced materials costs with our nanostructures compared to commonly used plasmonic materials such as gold and silver, as well as size regimes scalable to higher-throughput approaches such as photolithography and nanoimprint lithography. These advances could pave the way toward a new generation of low-cost, high-resolution, plasmonic color printing with direct applications in security tagging, cryptography, and information storage.
Lithium niobate (LN), an outstanding and versatile material, has influenced our daily life for decades: from enabling high-speed optical communications that form the backbone of the Internet to realizing radio-frequency filtering used in our cell phones. This half-century-old material is currently embracing a revolution in thin-film LN integrated photonics. The success of manufacturing wafer-scale, high-quality, thin films of LN on insulator (LNOI), accompanied with breakthroughs in nanofabrication techniques, have made high-performance integrated nanophotonic components possible. With rapid development in the past few years, some of these thin-film LN devices, such as optical modulators and nonlinear wavelength converters, have already outperformed their legacy counterparts realized in bulk LN crystals. Furthermore, the nanophotonic integration enabled ultra-low-loss resonators in LN, which unlocked many novel applications such as optical frequency combs and quantum transducers. In this Review, we cover-from basic principles to the state of the art-the diverse aspects of integrated thinfilm LN photonics, including the materials, basic passive components, and various active devices based on electro-optics, all-optical nonlinearities, and acousto-optics. We also identify challenges that this platform is currently facing and point out future opportunities. The field of integrated LNOI photonics is advancing rapidly and poised to make critical impacts on a broad range of applications in communication, signal processing, and quantum information.
Fewm ethods for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 currently have the capability to simultaneously detect two genes in as ingle test, whichi sakey measure to improve detection accuracy,a sa dopted by the gold standardR T-qPCR method. Developed here is aCRISPR/Cas9-mediated triple-line lateral flowa ssay(TL-LFA) combined with multiplex reverse transcription-recombinase polymerase amplification (RT-RPA) for rapid and simultaneous dual-gene detection of SARS-CoV-2 in as ingle strip test. This assayi sc haracterized by the detection of envelope (E) and open reading frame 1ab (Orf1ab) genes from cell-cultured SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV-2 viral RNAstandards,showing asensitivity of 100 RNA copies per reaction (25 mL). Furthermore,d ual-gene analysis of 64 nasopharyngeal swab samples showed 100 %n egative predictive agreement and 97.14 %p ositive predictive agreement. This platform will provide am ore accurate and convenient pathway for diagnosis of COVID-19 or other infectious diseases in low-resource regions.
Improving the temporal resolution of single photon detectors has an impact on many applications 1 , such as increased data rates and transmission distances for both classical 2 and quantum 3-5 optical communication systems, higher spatial resolution in laser ranging and observation of shorter-lived fluorophores in biomedical imaging 6 . In recent years, superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors 7,8 (SNSPDs) have emerged as the highest efficiency time-resolving single-photon counting detectors available in the near infrared 9 . As the detection mechanism in SNSPDs occurs on picosecond time scales 10 , SNSPDs have been demonstrated with exquisite temporal resolution below 15 ps [11][12][13][14][15] . We reduce this value to 2.7±0.2 ps at 400 nm and 4.6±0.2 ps at 1550 nm, using a specialized niobium nitride (NbN) SNSPD. The observed photon-energy dependence of the temporal resolution and detection latency suggests that intrinsic effects make a significant contribution.Temporal resolution in SNSPDs, commonly referred to as jitter, is characterized by the width of the temporal distribution of signal outputs with respect to the photon arrival times. This statistical distribution is known as the instrument response function (IRF), and its width is commonly evaluated as
DNA quantification is important for biomedical research, but the routinely used techniques rely on nucleic acid amplification which have inherent issues like cross-contamination risk and quantification bias. Here, we report a CRISPR-Cas12a-based molecular diagnostic technique for amplification-free and absolute quantification of DNA at the single-molecule level. To achieve this, we first screened out the optimal reaction parameters for high-efficient Cas12a assay, yielding over 50-fold improvement in sensitivity compared with the reported Cas12a assays. We further leveraged the microdroplet-enabled confinement effect to perform an ultralocalized droplet Cas12a assay, obtaining excellent specificity and single-molecule sensitivity. Moreover, we demonstrated its versatility and quantification capability by direct counting of diverse virus’s DNAs (African swine fever virus, Epstein–Barr virus, and Hepatitis B virus) from clinical serum samples with a wide range of viral titers. Given the flexible programmability of crRNA, we envision this amplification-free technique as a versatile and quantitative platform for molecular diagnosis.
Detecting spatial and temporal information of individual photons by using singlephoton-detector (SPD) arrays is critical to applications in spectroscopy, communication, biological imaging, astronomical observation, and quantum-information processing. Among the current SPDs 1 , detectors based on superconducting nanowires have outstanding performance 2 , but are limited in their ability to be integrated into large scale arrays due to the engineering difficulty of high-bandwidth cryogenic electronic readout [3][4][5][6][7][8] . Here, we address this problem by demonstrating a scalable single-photon imager using a single continuous photon-sensitive superconducting nanowire microwave-plasmon transmission line. By appropriately designing the nanowire's local electromagnetic environment so that the nanowire guides microwave plasmons, the propagating voltages signals generated by a photon-detection event were slowed down to ~ 2% of the speed of light. As a result, the time difference between arrivals of the signals at the two 2 ends of the nanowire naturally encoded the position and time of absorption of the photon. Thus, with only two readout lines, we demonstrated that a 19.7-mm-long nanowire meandered across an area of 286 μm × 193 μm was capable of resolving ~ 590 effective pixels while simultaneously recording the arrival times of photons with a temporal resolution of 50 ps. The nanowire imager presents a scalable approach to realizing high-resolution photon imaging in time and space. Main Text:Quantum and classical optics are currently limited by our ability to efficiently sense and process information about single photons. For example, to enhance the information-carrying capacity of a quantum channel 9 and improve security in quantum key distribution 10,11 , information is typically encoded in the position and arrival time of individual photons.Determining the spatial and temporal information of photons is currently accomplished by single-photon detector (SPD) arrays. Among existing SPD array technologies, the transition edge sensor (TES) and the microwave kinetic inductance detector (MKID) provide moderate spectral information but less impressive temporal resolution (e.g., the timing jitter is measured in nanoseconds for TESs 12 and microseconds for MKIDs 13 ). Photomultiplier tubes and singlephoton avalanche diodes have sub-1-ns timing jitter in the visible domain, but their detection performance deteriorates in the infrared, and scaling these technologies to large spatial arrays is challenging 1 . Improved timing performance of sub-20-ps timing jitter 14 and sub-10-ns recovery time 15 is possible with superconducting-nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs), which also have been demonstrated to have near-unity detection efficiency 2 , less than 1 dark-count per second (cps) 16 , a wide spectral response from the visible to infrared 17 and greater than 100 cps 3 counting rate 18 . However, attempts to create arrays of SNSPDs have had limited success 3-8 .Traditional row-column rectangular pixel arra...
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