Topological lasing: Resonant cavities that confine light are crucial components of lasers. Typically, these cavities are designed to high specification to get the best possible output. That, however, can limit their integration into photonic devices and optical circuits. Bahariet al.fabricated resonant cavities of arbitrary shape within a hybrid photonic crystal structure. The confinement of light to topologically protected edge states resulted in lasing at communication wavelengths. Relaxing the resonant cavity design criteria should be useful in designing photonic devices.Science, this issue p.636

Upon reflection, modulate phase: Metasurfaces provide a platform to fabricate optical devices in a compact form much thinner than their corresponding bulk optical components. Recognizing that metasurfaces are also open systems interacting with their environment, Song et al . designed a metasurface that exploits those non-Hermitian properties such that they can encircle an exceptional point. Subsequent scattering from such an exceptional point was shown to be polarization dependent, thus providing an additional control knob in designing metasurfaces for wave front engineering. —ISO

Planar structured interfaces, also known as metasurfaces, are continuously attracting interest owing to their ability to manipulate fundamental attributes of light, including angular momentum, phase, or polarization. However, chromatic aberration, limiting broadband operation, has remained a challenge for metasurfaces-based optical components and imagers. The limitation stems from the intrinsic dispersion of existing materials and design principles. Here we report and experimentally demonstrate polarization-independent fishnet-achromatic-metalenses with measured average efficiencies over 70% in the continuous band from the visible (640 nm) to the infrared (1200 nm). Results of the scalable platform are enabling for applications requiring broad bandwidth and high efficiency including energy harvesting, virtual reality and information processing devices, or medical imaging.