Phonon-assisted upconverted emission is the heart of energy harvesting, bioimaging, optical cryptography, and optical refrigeration. It has been demonstrated that emerging two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors can provide an excellent platform for efficient phonon-assisted upconversion due to the enhanced optical transition strength and phonon-exciton interaction of 2D excitons. However, there is little research on the further enhancement of excitonic upconverted emission in 2D semiconductors. Here, we report the enhanced multiphoton upconverted emission of 2D excitons in doubly resonant plasmonic nanocavities. Owing to the enhanced light collection, enhanced excitation rate, and quantum efficiency enhancement arising from the Purcell effect, an upconverted emission amplification of >1000-fold and a decrease of 2~3 orders of magnitude in the saturated excitation power are achieved. These findings pave the way for the development of excitonic upconversion lasing, nanoscopic thermometry, and sensing, revealing the possibility of optical refrigeration in future 2D electronic or excitonic devices.

Phonon-assisted photon upconversion (UPC) is an anti-Stokes process in which incident photons achieve higher energy emission by absorbing phonons. This letter studies phonon-assisted UPC in twisted 2D semiconductors, in which an inverted contrast between UPC and conventional photoluminescence (PL) of WSe2 twisted bilayer is emergent. A 4-fold UPC enhancement is achieved in 5.5° twisted bilayer while PL weakens by half. Reduced interlayer exciton conversion efficiency driven by lattice relaxation, along with enhanced pump efficiency resulting from spectral redshift, lead to the rotation-angle-dependent UPC enhancement. The counterintuitive phenomenon provides a novel insight into a unique way that twisted angle affects UPC and light-matter interactions in 2D semiconductors. Furthermore, the UPC enhancement platform with various superimposable means offers an effective method for lighting bilayers and expanding the application prospect of 2D stacked van der Waals devices.

Van der Waals heterostructures of two-dimensional materials are naturally endowed with the nanoscale moiré pattern, which has become a versatile platform for studying novel quantum phenomena during past decades. Here,...

Chirality plays an important role in biological processes, and enantiomers often possess similar physical properties and different physiologic functions. In recent years, chiral detection of enantiomers become a popular topic. Plasmonic metasurfaces enhance weak inherent chiral effects of biomolecules, so they are used in chiral detection. Artificial intelligence algorithm makes a lot of contribution to many aspects of nanophotonics. Here, we propose a nanostructure design method based on reinforcement learning and devise chiral nanostructures to distinguish enantiomers. The algorithm finds out the metallic nanostructures with a sharp peak in circular dichroism spectra and emphasizes the frequency shifts caused by nearfield interaction of nanostructures and biomolecules. Our work inspires universal and efficient machinelearning methods for nanophotonic design.

Valleytronics in 2D transition metal dichalcogenides has raised a great impact in nanophotonic information processing and transport as it provides the pseudospin degree of freedom for carrier control. The imbalance of carrier occupation in inequivalent valleys can be achieved by external stimulations such as helical light and electric field. With metasurfaces, it is feasible to separate the valley exciton in real space and momentum space, which is significant for logical nanophotonic circuits. However, the control of valley‐separated far‐field emission by a single nanostructure is rarely reported, despite the fact that it is crucial for subwavelength research of valley‐dependent directional emission. Here, it is demonstrated that the electron beam permits the chirality‐selective routing of valley photons in a monolayer WS2 with Au nanostructures. The electron beam can locally excite valley excitons and regulate the coupling between excitons and nanostructures, hence controlling the interference effect of multipolar electric modes in nanostructures. Therefore, the separation degree can be modified by steering the electron beam, exhibiting the capability of subwavelength control of valley separation. This work provides a novel method to create and resolve the variation of valley emission distribution in momentum space, paving the way for the design of future nanophotonic integrated devices.

optoelectronic elements and devices. Owing to the unique talents of electrons and photons, the efficient photonic communication and electronic processing of signals have been proved as the essential and core components the information technology. Electrons as charged particles are sensitive to surroundings because of strong Coulomb interaction, leading to the bottleneck of nanosecond response time for integrated electric devices. The electronic response time and the conversation between photonic and electronic systems inevitably limit the operation speed in the conventional optoelectronic. [1] Thus developing compact photonic devices performing the essential logic operations is promising to accelerate information transmission and processing. In this direction, some simple prototypes, including optoelectronic transistor, compact microring resonator-based modulator, and Mach-Zehnder modulator, have been demonstrated. [2][3][4] The high integration of photonic devices is challenging due to the optical diffraction limit. Although the latter devices have achieved switching speeds exceeding several gigahertz, high packing density is greatly limited by their active-region dimensions of 10-100 µm. Excitons, or bound electron−hole pairs, Devices operating with excitons have promising prospects for overcoming the dilemma of response time and integration in current generation of electron-or/and photon-based elements and devices. In combination with the advantages of emerging twistronics and valleytronics, the atomically thin transition metal dichalcogenide semiconductors open up new opportunities for pursuing practical excitonic devices, where the strong exciton binding energy enables operating exciton at room temperature. The essential and foremost step toward exciton devices is the control of spatiotemporal exciton flux, which is density-dependent and affected by the complex many-body interactions. It can be effectively controlled by the strain, electric field, electron-doping, and local dielectric environment. Intriguingly, exotic phenomena such as exciton condensation, electron-hole liquid, exciton Hall effects, and exciton halo effects can be occurred in 2D exciton system, providing new possibilities for excitonic devices. Up to now, the proof-of-principle of room temperature exciton devices, including excitonic switching and transistor, exciton guides, and excitonic nanolaser, have been realized. Here the authors review the recent advances in molding 2D exciton flux from basic principle, manipulation, exotic phenomena to promising applications and discuss the opportunities and challenges in pushing the frontiers of room temperature excitonic devices.

The manipulation of polarization states beyond the optical limit presents advantages in various applications. Considerable progress has been made in the design of meta-waveplates for on-demand polarization transformation, realized by numerical simulations and parameter sweep methodologies. However, due to the limited freedom in these classical strategies, particular challenges arise from the emerging requirement for multiplex optical devices and multidimensional manipulation of light, which urge for a large number of different nanostructures with great polarization control capability. Here, we demonstrate a set of self-designed arbitrary wave plates with a high polarization conversion efficiency. We combine Bayesian optimization and deep neural networks to design perfect half- and quarter-waveplates based on metallic nanostructures, which experimentally demonstrate excellent polarization control functionalities with the conversion ratios of 85% and 90%. More broadly, we develop a comprehensive wave plate database consisting of various metallic nanostructures with high polarization conversion efficiency, accompanying a flexible tuning of phase shifts (0–2π) and group delays (0–10 fs), and construct an achromatic metalens based on this database. Owing to the versatility and excellent performance, our self-designed wave plates can promote the performance of multiplexed broadband metasurfaces and find potential applications in compact optical devices and polarization division multiplexing optical communications.

As topological charge constitutes an infinite‐dimensional Hilbert space, vortex beam has numerous applications in optical communications and other fields where signal capacity is a vital requirement. Multifunctional vortex beams, showing up to different controllable responses subjected to separate combinations of polarization states, have significantly exhibited improved capacity of signal transport. Relying on prior physical knowledge, complex requirement brings tremendous challenge to the design of multifunctional vortex beams. Here, a deep‐learning‐based platform for designing metasurfaces is proposed, which can intelligently generate predesigned multifunctional vortex beams. Employing the proposed strategy, the demonstrations of bifunctional and trifunctional vortex beams are consistent with the design targets. Three samples are fabricated and measured by a Michelson interferometer. Clear observed interference patterns revealed the topological nature of the generated vortex beams, unambiguously justifying the design platform. This intelligent design strategy, which may inspire new ideas in other scientific fields, lays a solid foundation for the high‐performance application of multifunctional vortex beams. This work fully exploits the potential of vortex beams for large‐scale dense data communication and quantum optics with high quantum numbers, which may further promote the development of the integrated photonic chip.