High-quality photonic materials are critical for promoting integrated photonic devices with broad bandwidths, high efficiencies, and flexibilities for high-volume chip-scale fabrication. Recently, we designed a home-developed chalcogenide glass (ChG)-Ge₂₅Sb₁₀S₆₅ (GeSbS) for optical information processing chips and systems, which featured an ultrabroad transmission window, a high Kerr nonlinearity and photoelastic coefficient, and compatibility with the photonic hybrid integration technology of silicon photonics. Chip-integrated GeSbS microresonators and microresonator arrays with high quality factors and lithographically controlled fine structures were fabricated using a modified nanofabrication process. Moreover, considering the high Kerr nonlinearity and photoelastic effect of ChGs, we realised a novel ChG hybrid integrated chip, inspired by recent advances in integrated soliton microcombs and acousto-optic (AO) modulators.

Interests surrounding the development of on-chip nonlinear optical devices have been consistently growing in the past decades due to the tremendous applications, such as quantum photonics, all-optical communications, optical computing, on-chip metrology, and sensing. Developing efficient on-chip nonlinear optical devices to meet the requirements of those applications brings the need for new directions to improve the existing photonic approaches. Recent research has directed the field of on-chip nonlinear optics toward the hybrid integration of two-dimensional layered materials (such as graphene, transition metal dichalcogenides, and black phosphorous) with various integrated platforms. The combination of well-known photonic chip design platforms (e.g., silicon, silicon nitride) and different two-dimensional layered materials has opened the road for more versatile and efficient structures and devices, which has the great potential to unlock numerous new possibilities. This review discusses the modeling and characterization of different hybrid photonic integration structures with two-dimensional materials, highlights the current state of the art examples, and presents an outlook for future prospects.

Aspheric surfaces are widely used in advanced optical instruments. Measuring the aspheric surface parameters (ASPs) with high accuracy is vital for manufacturing and aligning optical aspheric surfaces. This paper provides a review of various techniques for measuring ASPs and discusses the advantages/disadvantages of these approaches. The aim of this review is to contribute to advancements in the fabrication and testing of aspheric optical elements and their practical applications in diverse fields.

Metal-halide perovskite light-emitting diodes (PeLEDs) possess wide colour gamut, high luminescence efficiency, and low-cost synthesis, making them a promising photonic source for next-generation display applications. Since the first room-temperature emission PeLED was demonstrated in 2014, their performance has improved rapidly within a few years, leading to considerable attention from academia and industry. In this review, we discuss the primary technical bottlenecks of PeLEDs for commercial display applications, including large-area PeLED preparation, patterning strategies, and flexible PeLED devices. We review the technical approaches for achieving these targets and highlight the current challenges while providing an outlook for these perovskite materials and PeLED devices to meet the requirements of the next-generation high-colour-purity full-colour display market.

Photocrosslinkable polymers have been exploited to attain impressive advantages in printing freestanding, micrometer-scale, mechanically compliant features. However, a more integrated understanding of both the polymer photochemistry and the microfabrication processes could enable new strategic design avenues, unlocking far-reaching applications of the light-based modality of additive manufacturing. One promising approach for achieving high-aspect-ratio structures is to leverage the phenomenon of light self-trapping during the photopolymerization process. In this review, we discuss the design of materials that facilitate this optical behavior, the computational modeling and practical processing considerations to achieve high aspect-ratio structures, and the range of applications that can benefit from architectures fabricated using light self-trapping—especially those demanding free-standing structures and materials of stiffnesses relevant in biological applications. Coupled interactions exist among material attributes, including polymer composition, and processing parameters such as light intensity. We identify strong opportunities for predictive design of both the material and the process. Overall, this perspective describes the wide range of existing polymers and additive manufacturing approaches, and highlights various future directions to enable constructs with new complexities and functionalities through the development of next-generation photocrosslinkable materials and micromanufacturing methods.

In this paper, we review the existing approaches for vortex and vector beam shaping and generation in the terahertz frequency range. The particular focus of this review is on the possibility of homogeneous topological charge formation in the ultra-wide spectral interval inherent to ultrashort terahertz pulses. We review the available materials and components, analyse proposed and potentially possible solutions for broadband terahertz vortex and vector beam shaping, compare all developed approaches, and put forward a unified concept for constructing passive shapers of such beams from the existing component base.

Helmet Mounted Displays (HMDs), such as in Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed reality (MR), and Smart Glasses have the potential to revolutionize the way we live our private and professional lives, as in communicating, working, teaching and learning, shopping and getting entertained. Such HMD devices have to satisfy draconian requirements in weight, size, form factor, power, compute, wireless communication and of course display, imaging and sensing performances. We review in this paper the various optical technologies and architectures that have been developed in the past 10 years to provide adequate solutions for the drastic requirements of consumer HMDs, a market that has yet to become mature in the next years, unlike the existing enterprise and defense markets that have already adopted VR and AR headsets as practical tools to improve greatly effectiveness and productivity. We focus specifically our attention on the optical combiner element, a crucial element in Optical See-Through (OST) HMDs that combines the see-through scene with a world locked digital image. As for the technological platform, we chose optical waveguide combiners, although there is also a considerable effort today dedicated to free-space combiners. Flat and thin optics as in micro-optics, holographics, diffractives, metasurfaces and other nanostructured optical elements are key building blocks to achieve the target form factor.

While 60 years of successful application of holography is celebrated in this special issue, efficient representation and compression of holographic data has received relatively little attention in research. Notwithstanding this observation, and particularly due to the digitization that is also penetrating the holographic domain, interest is growing on how to efficiently compress holographic data such that interactive exchange of content, as well as digital storage can be facilitated proficiently. This is a particular challenge, not only because of its interferometric nature and the various representation formats, but also the often extremely large data volumes involved in pathological, tomographic, or high-end visualization applications. In this paper, we provide an overview of the state of the art in compression techniques and corresponding quality metrics for various practical applications in digital holography. We also consider the future by analyzing the emerging trends for addressing the key challenges in this domain.

This paper recounts the discovery of holographic interferometry, discusses its development, and itemizes some of its major applications.