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Terahertz absorbers are crucial to the cutting-edge techniques in the next-generation wireless communications, imaging, sensing, and radar stealth, as they fundamentally determine the performance of detectors and cloaking capabilities. It has long been a pressing task to find absorbers with customizable performance that can adapt to various environments with low cost and great flexibility. Here, we demonstrate perfect absorption empowered by bound states in the continuum (BICs) allowing for the tailoring of absorption coefficient, bandwidth, and field of view. The one-port absorbers are interpreted using temporal coupled-mode theory highlighting the dominant role of BICs in the far-field radiation properties. Through a thorough investigation of BICs from the perspective of lattice symmetry, we unravel the radiation features of three BIC modes using both multipolar and topological analysis. The versatile radiation capabilities of BICs provide ample freedom to meet specific requirements of absorbers, including tunable bandwidth, stable performance in a large field of view, and multi-band absorption using a thin and flexible film without extreme geometric demands. Our findings offer a systematic approach to developing optoelectronic devices and demonstrate the significant potential of BICs for optical and photonic applications which will stimulate further studies on terahertz photonics and metasurfaces.

The discovery of photonic higher-order topological insulators (HOTIs) has significantly expanded our understanding of band topology and provided unprecedented lower-dimensional topological boundary states for robust photonic devices. However, due to the vectorial and leaky nature of electromagnetic waves, it is challenging to discover three-dimensional (3D) topological photonic systems and photonic HOTIs have so far still been limited to two dimensions (2D). Here, we report on the first experimental realization of a 3D Wannier-type photonic HOTI in a tight-binding-like metal-cage photonic crystal, whose band structure matches well with that of a 3D tight-binding model due to the confined Mie resonances. By microwave near-field measurements, we directly observe coexisting topological surface, hinge, and corner states in a single 3D photonic HOTI, as predicted by the tight-binding model and simulation results. Moreover, we demonstrate that all-order topological boundary states are self-guided even in the light cone continuum and can be exposed to air without ancillary cladding, making them well-suited for practical applications. Our work thus opens routes to the multi-dimensional robust manipulation of electromagnetic waves at the outer surfaces of 3D cladding-free photonic bandgap materials and may find novel applications in 3D topological integrated photonics devices., Comment: 23 pages,4 figures

The Bloch band theory and Brillouin zone (BZ) that characterize wave behaviors in periodic mediums are two cornerstones of contemporary physics ranging from condensed matter to topological physics. Recent theoretical breakthrough revealed that, under the projective symmetry algebra enforced by artificial gauge fields, the usual two-dimensional (2D) BZ (orientable Brillouin two-torus) can be fundamentally modified to a non-orientable Brillouin Klein bottle with radically distinct topology and novel topological phases. However, the physical consequence of artificial gauge fields on the more general three-dimensional (3D) BZ (orientable Brillouin three-torus) was so far missing. Here, we report the first theoretical discovery and experimental observation of non-orientable Brillouin Klein space and orientable Brillouin half-turn space in a 3D acoustic crystal with artificial gauge fields. We experimentally identify peculiar 3D momentum-space non-symmorphic screw rotation and glide reflection symmetries in the measured band structures. Moreover, we demonstrate a novel 3D Klein bottle insulator featuring a nonzero Z_2 topological invariant and self-collimated topological surface states at two opposite surfaces related by a nonlocal twist, radically distinct from all previous topological insulators. Our discovery not only fundamentally modifies the 3D Bloch band theory and 3D BZ, but also opens the door towards a wealth of previously overlooked momentum-space topologies and unexplored topological physics with gauge symmetry beyond the existing paradigms.

The celebrated anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence1-3, also known as the gravity/gauge duality, posits a dual relationship between the quantum gravity in an AdS spacetime and the CFT defined on its lower-dimensional boundary. This correspondence not only offers profound insights into the enigmatic nature of quantum gravity but also shows mighty power in addressing strongly-correlated systems. However, despite its importance in contemporary physics, the AdS/CFT correspondence remains a conjecture, and further experimental investigation is highly sought after. Here, we present the first experimental exploration of this conjecture by testing its core corollary: the leading-order effects of a strongly-coupled CFT can be exactly described by a weakly-coupled classical field in a higher-dimensional AdS spacetime. Through measuring the bulk entanglement entropy (BEE) and boundary-boundary correlation function (BBCF) of scalar fields in both conventional type-I and previously overlooked type-II hyperbolic lattices, serving as the discretized regularizations of spatial geometries of pure AdS2+1 spacetime and AdS2+1 black hole, respectively, we experimentally confirm that BEE exhibits a logarithmic scaling with the subsystem size, following the Ryu-Takayanagi (RT) formula, while BBCF showcases an exponential law dependence on the boundary separation, the scaling dimension of which conforms to the Klebanov-Witten (KW) relation, both of which align remarkably well with the established CFT outcomes. This heuristic experimental effort opens a new avenue for in-depth investigations on the gravity/gauge duality and extensive exploration of quantum-gravity-inspired phenomena in classical systems.

Recent advancements in photonic bound states in the continuum (BICs) have opened up exciting new possibilities for the design of optoelectronic devices with improved performance. In this perspective article, we provide an overview of recent progress in photonic BICs based on metamaterials and photonic crystals, focusing on both the underlying physics and their practical applications. The first part of this article introduces two different interpretations of BICs, based on far-field interference of multipoles and near-field analysis of topological charges. We then discuss recent research on manipulating the far-field radiation properties of BICs through the engineering of topological charges. The second part of the article summarizes recent developments in the applications of BICs, including chiral light and vortex beam generation, nonlinear optical frequency conversion, sensors, and nanolasers. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the potential of photonic BICs to advance terahertz applications in areas such as generation and detection, modulation, sensing, and isolation. We believe that continued research in this area will lead to exciting new advancements in optoelectronics, particularly in the field of terahertz devices.

Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) is a novel enabling technology that can turn existing fibre optic networks to distributed acoustic sensors. However, it faces the challenges of transmitting, storing, and processing massive streams of data which are orders of magnitude larger than that collected from point sensors. The gap between intensive data generated by DAS and modern computing system with limited reading/writing speed and storage capacity imposes restrictions on many applications. Compressive sensing (CS) is a revolutionary signal acquisition method that allows a signal to be acquired and reconstructed with significantly fewer samples than that required by Nyquist-Shannon theorem. Though the data size is greatly reduced in the sampling stage, the reconstruction of the compressed data is however time and computation consuming. To address this challenge, we propose to map the feature extractor from Nyquist-domain to compressed-domain and therefore vibration detection and classification can be directly implemented in compressed-domain. The measured results show that our framework can be used to reduce the transmitted data size by 70% while achieves 99.4% true positive rate (TPR) and 0.04% false positive rate (TPR) along 5 km sensing fibre and 95.05% classification accuracy on a 5-class classification task.

Roton dispersion relations, displaying a pronounced "roton" minimum at finite momentum, were firstly predicted by Landau and have been extensively explored in correlated quantum systems at low temperatures. Recently, the roton-like dispersion relations were theoretically extended to classical acoustics, which, however, have remained elusive in reality. Here, we report the experimental observation of roton-like dispersions in acoustic metamaterials with beyond-nearest-neighbour interactions at ambient temperatures. The resulting metamaterial supports multiple coexisting modes with different wavevectors and group velocities at the same frequency and broadband backward waves, analogous to the "return flow" termed by Feynman in the context of rotons. Moreover, by increasing the order of long-range interaction, we observe multiple rotons on a single dispersion band, which have never appeared in Landau's prediction or any other condensed matter study. The realization of roton-like dispersions in metamaterials could pave the way to explore novel physics and applications on quantum-inspired phenomena in classical systems.

In this paper, we theoretically investigate the time dilation and Doppler effect in curved space-time from the perspective of quantum field theory (QFT). A Coordinate Transformation which Maintains the Period of Clocks is introduced, and such coordinate transformation is named as CTMPC throughout this paper. By analogy with the Lorentz transformation in Minkowski space-time, CTMPC is a correct transformation in curved space-times in a sense that it shows the correct relation between the time measured by the two observers, moreover, Lorentz transformation is just a special case of CTMPC applied in Minkowski space-time. We demonstrate that the Coordinate Transformation which Maintains the Local Metric (CTMLM) is one CTMPC, while the mathematical forms of physics formulas in QFT will be maintained. As applications of CTMLM, the time dilation and Doppler effect with an arbitrary time-dependent relative velocity in curved space-time are analysed. For Minkowski space-time, the time dilation and Doppler effect agree with the clock hypothesis. For curved space-time, we show that even if the emitted wave has a narrow frequency range, the Doppler effect may, in general, broaden the frequency spectrum and, at the meantime, shift the frequencies values. These new findings will deepen our understanding on the nature of space-time and the Doppler effect in curved space-time, they may also provide theoretical guidance in future astronomical observations., Comment: 37 pages, 3 figures. Explanation of CTMPC is added

Pulse coding is an effective method to overcome the trade-off between signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and spatial resolution in optical-fiber sensing systems based on optical time-domain reflectometry (OTDR). However, the coding gain has not been yet fully exploited. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis and experimental validation of the sampling criteria for correlation-coded OTDR, showing that the coding gain can be further improved by harnessing the oversampling. Moreover, the bandwidth-limited feature of the photodetector can also be utilized to select the sampling rate so that additional SNR enhancement is obtained. We believe this principle could be applied to any practical OTDR-based optical-fiber sensing technology, and serve to update existing systems based on correlation-coded OTDR in a straightforward manner at a relatively low cost., Comment: 7 pages, 8 figures

We investigate the effects of non-Hermiticity on topological pumping, and uncover a connection between a topological edge invariant based on topological pumping and the winding numbers of exceptional points. In Hermitian lattices, it is known that the topologically nontrivial regime of the topological pump only arises in the infinite-system limit. In finite non-Hermitian lattices, however, topologically nontrivial behavior can also appear. We show that this can be understood in terms of the effects of encircling a pair of exceptional points during a pumping cycle. This phenomenon is observed experimentally, in a non-Hermitian microwave network containing variable gain amplifiers., Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures. The first author did the experiment, and the second author did the theoretical study

A novel Brillouin optical time-domain analysis (BOTDA) system is proposed using intensity-modulated optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing probe signal and direct detection (IM-DD-OOFDM) without frequency sweep operation. The influence of peak to average power ratio (PAPR) of OFDM probe signal on the recovery of Brillouin gain spectrum (BGS) is analyzed in theory and experiment. The complex BGS is reconstructed by channel estimation algorithm and Brillouin frequency shift (BFS) is located by curve fitting of intensity spectrum. The IM-DD-OOFDM BOTDA is demonstrated experimentally with 25m spatial resolution over 2 km standard single mode fiber., Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures

We report on the measurement of topological invariants in an electromagnetic topological insulator analog formed by a microwave network, consisting of the winding numbers of scattering matrix eigenvalues. The experiment can be regarded as a variant of a topological pump, with non-zero winding implying the existence of topological edge states. In microwave networks, unlike most other systems exhibiting topological insulator physics, the winding can be directly observed. The effects of loss on the experimental results, and on the topological edge states, is discussed., Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures

Phase noise is very important for the ultrafast pulse application in telecommunication, ultrafast diagnose, material science, and biology. In this paper, two types of carbon nano-materials, single-wall carbon nanotube and graphene oxide, are investigated for noise suppression in ultrafast photonics. Various properties of the wall-paper SAs, such as saturable intensity, optical absorption and degree of purity, are found to be key factors determining the phase noise of the ultrafast pulses. A reduced-noise femtosecond fiber laser is experimentally demonstrated by optimizing the above parameters of carbon material based SAs. The phase noise reduction more than 10 dB at 10 kHz can be obtained in the experiments. To our knowledge, this is the first time that the relationship between different carbon material based SAs and the phase noise of mode-locked lasers has been investigated. This work will pave the way to get a high-quality ultrashort pulse in passively mode-locked fiber lasers., Comment: 28 pages

With this paper we bring about a discussion on the computing potential of complex optical networks and provide experimental demonstration that an optical fiber network can be used as an analog processor to calculate matrix inversion. A 3x3 matrix is inverted as a proof-of-concept demonstration using a fiber network containing three nodes and operating at telecomm wavelength. For an NxN matrix, the overall solving time (including setting time of the matrix elements and calculation time of inversion) scales as O(N^2), whereas matrix inversion by most advanced computer algorithms requires ~O(N^2.37) computational time. For well-conditioned matrices, the error of the inversion performed optically is found to be less than 3%, limited by the accuracy of measurement equipment., Comment: 5 pages