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The Winter Colloquium on the Physics of Quantum Electronics (PQE) has been a seminal force in quantum optics and related areas since 1971. It is rather mind-boggling to recognize how the concepts presented at these conferences have transformed scientific understanding and human society. In January 2017, the participants of PQE were asked to consider the equally important prospects for the future, and to formulate a set of questions representing some of the greatest aspirations in this broad field. The result is this multi-authored paper, in which many of the world’s leading experts address the following fundamental questions: (1) What is the future of gravitational wave astronomy? (2) Are there new quantum phases of matter away from equilibrium that can be found and exploited - such as the time crystal? (3) Quantum theory in uncharted territory: What can we learn? (4) What are the ultimate limits for laser photon energies? (5) What are the ultimate limits to temporal, spatial and optical resolution? (6) What novel roles will atoms play in technology? (7) What applications lie ahead for nitrogen-vacancy centres in diamond? (8) What is the future of quantum coherence, squeezing and entanglement for enhanced super-resolution and sensing? (9) How can we solve (some of) humanity’s biggest problems through new quantum technologies? (10) What new understanding of materials and biological molecules will result from their dynamical characterization with free-electron lasers? (11) What new technologies and fundamental discoveries might quantum optics achieve by the end of this century? (12) What novel topological structures can be created and employed in quantum optics? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The photonic crystals draw significant attention to build all-optical logic devices and are considered one of the solutions for the opto-electronic bottleneck via speed and size. The paper presents a novel optical 4 × 2 encoder based on 2D square lattice photonic crystals of silicon rods. The main realization of optical encoder is based on the photonic crystal ring resonator NOR gates. The proposed structure has four logic input ports, two output ports, and two bias input port. The photonic crystal structure has a square lattice of silicon rods with a refractive index of 3.39 in air. The structure has lattice constant ‘a’ equal to 630 nm and bandgap range from 0.32 to 044. The total size of the proposed 4 × 2 encoder is equal to 35 μm × 35 μm. The simulation results using the dimensional finite difference time domain and Plane Wave Expansion methods confirm the operation and the feasibility of the proposed optical encoder for ultrafast optical digital circuits. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Imaging characteristics of germanium cylinder-based decagonal photonic quasicrystal flat lens have been analyzed with respect to width. The results show that the complex near-field scattering effects and the short-range interactions do not determine the occurrence of the imaging phenomenon but affect imaging characteristics. Changing the width will affect the imaging characteristics of the flat lens. As the width increases, the image power, the image quality, and the summed object–image distance change non-monotonically but stabilize gradually. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Single-pixel imaging has emerged a decade ago as an imaging technique that exploits the theory of compressive sensing. In this research, the problem of optimizing the measurement matrix in compressive sensing framework was addressed. Thus far, random measurement matrices are widely used because they provide small coherence. However, recent reports claim that measurement matrix can be optimized, thereby improving its performance. Based on such proposition, this study proposed an alternative approach of optimizing the measurement matrix in a hierarchical model. In particular, this study constructed the hierarchical model based on an increasing resolution grade by exploiting the guided information and the adaptive step size method. An image with a demanded resolution was then obtained using the l1-norm method. Subsequently, the performance of the introduced method was verified and compared with those of existing approaches via several experiments. Results of the tests indicated that the reconstruction quality of optimizing the measurement matrix was improved when the proposed method was used. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A correlation between the line-width in super-resolved fluorescence microscopy and nonlinear optical theory used for polydiacetylene crystal-film is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]