Structural coloration generates colors by the interaction between incident light and micro- or nano-scale structures. It has received tremendous interest for decades, due to advantages including robustness against bleaching and environmentally friendly properties (compared with conventional pigments and dyes). As a versatile coloration strategy, the tuning of structural colors based on micro- and nanoscale photonic structures has been extensively explored and can enable a broad range of applications including displays, anti-counterfeiting, and coating. However, scholarly research on structural colors has had limited impact on commercial products because of their disadvantages in cost, scalability, and fabrication. In this review, we analyze the key challenges and opportunities in the development of structural colors. We first summarize the fundamental mechanisms and design strategies for structural colors while reviewing the recent progress in realizing dynamic structural coloration. The promising potential applications including optical information processing and displays are also discussed while elucidating the most prominent challenges that prevent them from translating into technologies on the market. Finally, we address the new opportunities that are underexplored by the structural coloration community but can be achieved through multidisciplinary research within the emerging research areas.

Optical bound states in the continuum (BICs) have recently stimulated a research boom, accompanied by demonstrations of abundant exotic phenomena and applications. With ultrahigh quality (Q) factors, optical BICs have powerful abilities to trap light in optical structures from the continuum of propagation waves in free space. Besides the high Q factors enabled by the confined properties, many hidden topological characteristics were discovered in optical BICs. Especially in periodic structures with well-defined wave vectors, optical BICs were discovered to carry topological charges in momentum space, underlying many unique physical properties. Both high Q factors and topological vortex configurations in momentum space enabled by BICs bring new degrees of freedom to modulate light. BICs have enabled many novel discoveries in light–matter interactions and spin–orbit interactions of light, and BIC applications in lasing and sensing have also been well explored with many advantages. In this paper, we review recent developments of optical BICs in periodic structures, including the physical mechanisms of BICs, explored effects enabled by BICs, and applications of BICs. In the outlook part, we provide a perspective on future developments for BICs.

Metasurfaces offer a unique playground to tailor the electromagnetic field at subwavelength scale to control polarization, wavefront, and nonlinear processes. Tunability of the optical response of these structures is challenging due to the nanoscale size of their constitutive elements. A long-sought solution to achieve tunability at the nanoscale is all-optical modulation by exploiting the ultrafast nonlinear response of materials. However, the nonlinear response of materials is inherently very weak, and, therefore, requires optical excitations with large values of fluence. We show that by properly tuning the equilibrium optical response of a nonlocal metasurface, it is possible to achieve sizable variation of the photoinduced out-of-equilibrium optical response on the picosecond timescale employing fluences smaller than 250 μJ / cm², which is 1 order of magnitude lower than previous studies with comparable reflectivity variations in silicon platforms. Our results pave the way to fast devices with large modulation amplitude.

Precise and ultrafast control over photo-induced charge currents across nanoscale interfaces could lead to important applications in energy harvesting, ultrafast electronics, and coherent terahertz sources. Recent studies have shown that several relativistic mechanisms, including inverse spin-Hall effect, inverse Rashba–Edelstein effect, and inverse spin-orbit-torque effect, can convert longitudinally injected spin-polarized currents from magnetic materials to transverse charge currents, thereby harnessing these currents for terahertz generation. However, these mechanisms typically require external magnetic fields and exhibit limitations in terms of spin-polarization rates and efficiencies of relativistic spin-to-charge conversion. We present a nonrelativistic and nonmagnetic mechanism that directly utilizes the photoexcited high-density charge currents across the interface. We demonstrate that the electrical anisotropy of conductive oxides RuO₂ and IrO₂ can effectively deflect injected charge currents to the transverse direction, resulting in efficient and broadband terahertz radiation. Importantly, this mechanism has the potential to offer much higher conversion efficiency compared to previous methods, as conductive materials with large electrical anisotropy are readily available, whereas further increasing the spin-Hall angle of heavy-metal materials would be challenging. Our findings offer exciting possibilities for directly utilizing these photoexcited high-density currents across metallic interfaces for ultrafast electronics and terahertz spectroscopy.

Micro- and nanodisk lasers have emerged as promising optical sources and probes for on-chip and free-space applications. However, the randomness in disk diameter introduced by standard nanofabrication makes it challenging to obtain deterministic wavelengths. To address this, we developed a photoelectrochemical (PEC) etching-based technique that enables us to precisely tune the lasing wavelength with subnanometer accuracy. We examined the PEC mechanism and compound semiconductor etching rate in diluted sulfuric acid solution. Using this technique, we produced microlasers on a chip and isolated particles with distinct lasing wavelengths. These precisely tuned disk lasers were then used to tag cells in culture. Our results demonstrate that this scalable technique can be used to produce groups of lasers with precise emission wavelengths for various nanophotonic and biomedical applications.

人工设计的光子学器件在现代光学的各个领域都有广阔的应用前景。传统光子学器件的设计通常是基于已知的物理模型，然后通过数值模拟方法对结构进行优化设计。由于器件结构很大程度上依赖于先验模型，所以传统优化设计的自由度是有限的。随着近年来对高性能光子学器件需求的日益增长，具有更高设计自由度的逆向设计方法得到了快速发展。逆向设计方法打破了传统方法的设计局限性，可以在全参数空间中实现高效的参数优化，因此更可能得到具有极限性能的器件结构。本文总结了光子学器件逆向设计的常用方法，并给出了逆向设计在各个光子学领域中的具体应用。随着计算机科学的不断发展，逆向设计方法展现出无与伦比的潜力，有望在各个光学领域中实现更高自由度的光场调控。

高性能的片上纳米激光器对通信、传感以及量子等领域的发展有着至关重要的意义。纳米激光器中高的光学限制因子可以保证更大的模式增益，实现更低的激光器阈值。首先阐明了借助物理气相沉积和原子层沉积制备Si₃N₄/WS₂/Al₂O₃三明治型纳米激光器阵列的工艺流程；构建了该纳米激光器的仿真模型，在仿真模型中对实际结构进行了简化并分析了Al₂O₃覆盖层厚度T、Si₃N₄微盘直径D和厚度H对光学限制因子的影响。光学限制因子随着Al₂O₃覆盖层T以及Si₃N₄微盘直径D的增加有先增加后减小的趋势，Si₃N₄微盘厚度H的减小也可以显著增加激光器的光学限制因子；最后展示了器件的荧光以及扫描电子显微镜的表征结果。该工作为集成光学芯片中可规模制备的高性能纳米激光器打下了良好基础。