Ultrafast, high-intensity light-matter interactions lead to optical-field-driven photocurrents with an attosecond-level temporal response. These photocurrents can be used to detect the carrier-envelope-phase (CEP) of short optical pulses, and enable optical-frequency, petahertz (PHz) electronics for high-speed information processing. Despite recent reports on optical-field-driven photocurrents in various nanoscale solid-state materials, little has been done in examining the large-scale electronic integration of these devices to improve their functionality and compactness. In this work, we demonstrate enhanced, on-chip CEP detection via optical-field-driven photocurrents in a monolithic array of electrically-connected plasmonic bow-tie nanoantennas that are contained within an area of hundreds of square microns. The technique is scalable and could potentially be used for shot-to-shot CEP tagging applications requiring orders-of-magnitude less pulse energy compared to alternative ionization-based techniques. Our results open avenues for compact time-domain, on-chip CEP detection, and inform the development of integrated circuits for PHz electronics as well as integrated platforms for attosecond and strong-field science.

A complete description of the work may be found here.

Electron beams can acquire designed phase modulations by passing through nanostructured material phase plates. These phase modulations enable electron wavefront shaping and benefit electron microscopy, spectroscopy, lithography, and interferometry. However, in the fabrication of electron phase plates, the typically used focused-ion-beam-milling method limits the fabrication throughput and hence the active area of the phase plates. Here, we fabricated large-area electron phase plates with electron-beam lithography and reactive-ion-etching. The phase plates are characterized by electron diffraction in transmission electron microscopes with various electron energies, as well as diffractive imaging in a scanning electron microscope. We found the phase plates could produce a null in the center of the bright-field based on coherent interference of diffractive beams. Our work adds capabilities to the fabrication of electron phase plates. The nullification of the direct beam and the tunable diffraction efficiency demonstrated here also paves the way towards novel dark-field electron-microscopy techniques.

A complete description of the work may be found here.

We demonstrate saturated internal detection efficiency at 1550 nm wavelengths for meander-shaped superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors made of 3 nm thick MoSi films with widths of 1 and 3 μm and active areas up to 400 × 400 μm². Despite hairpin turns and a large number of squares (up to 10⁴) in the device, the dark count rate was measured to be ∼10³ cps at 99% of the switching current. This value is about two orders of magnitude lower than the results reported recently for short MoSi devices with shunt resistors. We also found that 5 nm thick MoSi detectors with the same geometry were insensitive to single near-infrared photons, which may be associated with different levels of suppression of the superconducting order parameter. However, our results obtained on 3 nm thick MoSi devices are in good agreement with predictions in the frame of a kinetic-equation approach

A complete description of the work may be found here.

Our group participated to the CLEO2020 conference with four talks. You can find the recordings at the following links:

• Dr. Mina Bionta Towards Integrated Attosecond Time-Domain Spectroscopy (00:02:05) [also featured in the talk: What’s Next in Ultrafast Optics – Hot Topics at CLEO: 2020]

• Marco Colangelo Superconducting nanowire single-photon detector on thin-film lithium niobate photonic waveguide (01:30:48) [also featured in the talk: What’s Next in Integrated Photonics – Hot Topics at CLEO: 2020]

• Marco Turchetti Low-Energy Optical Pulse Detection Using Biased Plasmonic Nanoantenna (00:02:33)

• Dr. Di Zhu – highlighted talk (30 min) – Photon-Number Resolution Using Superconducting Tapered Nanowire Detector (00:59:41)