1016001Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) and energy harvesting technologies are expected to provide revolutionary technological changes in important fields such as 5G communications and the Internet of Things. The short-range coupling WPT has gradually been commercialized, but there are still many technical bottlenecks in the practical process of microwave power transmission that can realize long-distance applications, such as the contradiction between the limited aperture of transceiver antennas and the WPT efficiency. The developments of electromagnetic metamaterials and metasurfaces have brought new breakthroughs for solving the above-mentioned problems. In this paper, we will focus on the combination of the two important technologies, and systematically review the applications of metamaterials in microwave wireless power transfer and wireless energy harvesting. The results show that the near-field focusing metasurface can significantly improve the transfer efficiency. We will also introduce the research progress of optically transparent metasurfaces and reconfigurable metasurfaces for improving WPT performance and practicability. Based on the periodically close arrangements of subwavelength metamaterial units, a wireless energy harvester with wide-angle incidence and polarization-insensitive characteristics is designed, which can replace conventional receiving antennas with higher harvesting efficiency. Furthermore, coplanar integration with the rectifying diodes makes a new concept of the rectifying metasurface, which can simplify the overall structure, reduce the size, and improve the efficiency. Finally, we will discuss the future progress of WPT, and point out the vital role that programmable and intelligent metamaterial technologies will play very important roles in future simultaneous wireless information and power transfer systems.

We demonstrate the generation of non-classical photon pairs in a warm Rb87 atomic vapor cell with no buffer gas or polarization preserving coatings via spontaneous four-wave mixing. We obtain the photon pairs with a 1/e correlation time of 40 ns and the violation of Cauchy–Schwartz inequality by a factor of 23±3. This provides a convenient and efficient method to generate photon pair sources based on an atomic ensemble.

The spin Hall effect of light (SHEL) can be observed by the dark strip resulting from weak measurement. We find that the SHEL of a partially coherent beam (PCB) has a similar phenomenon as well. However, the dark strip in the SHEL of a PCB cannot be explained by considering the beam as an assemblance of coherent speckles. Also, the dark strip in a PCB is not purely dark. By analyzing the autocorrelation, we show that the SHEL of a PCB is the result of overlapping coherent speckles’ SHEL. We further prove our conclusion by adjusting convergence and incident angles. Finally, we develop a qualitative theory to clarify the SHEL of a PCB.