Optical diodes controlling the flow of light are of principal significance for optical information processing. They transmit light from an input to an output, but not in the reverse direction. This breaking of time reversal symmetry is conventionally achieved via Faraday or nonlinear effects. For applications in a quantum network, features such as the abilities of all-optical control, on-chip integration, and single-photon operation are important. Here we propose an all-optical optical diode which requires neither magnetic fields nor strong input fields. It is based on a ``moving'' photonic crystal generated in a three-level electromagnetically induced transparency medium in which the refractive index of a weak probe is modulated by the moving periodic intensity of a strong standing coupling field with two detuned counterpropagating components. Because of the Doppler effect, the frequency range of the crystal's band gap for the probe copropagating with the moving crystal is shifted from that for the counterpropagating probe. This mechanism is experimentally demonstrated in a room temperature Cs vapor cell.

Recently, text-guided scalable vector graphics (SVGs) synthesis has shown promise in domains such as iconography and sketch. However, existing text-to-SVG generation methods lack editability and struggle with visual quality and result diversity. To address these limitations, we propose a novel text-guided vector graphics synthesis method called SVGDreamer. SVGDreamer incorporates a semantic-driven image vectorization (SIVE) process that enables the decomposition of synthesis into foreground objects and background, thereby enhancing editability. Specifically, the SIVE process introduces attention-based primitive control and an attention-mask loss function for effective control and manipulation of individual elements. Additionally, we propose a Vectorized Particle-based Score Distillation (VPSD) approach to address issues of shape over-smoothing, color over-saturation, limited diversity, and slow convergence of the existing text-to-SVG generation methods by modeling SVGs as distributions of control points and colors. Furthermore, VPSD leverages a reward model to re-weight vector particles, which improves aesthetic appeal and accelerates convergence. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of SVGDreamer, demonstrating its superiority over baseline methods in terms of editability, visual quality, and diversity. Project page: https://ximinng.github.io/SVGDreamer-project/

We experimentally demonstrate the high-efficiency reflection of a probe field in $\Lambda${}-type three-level atoms of cesium vapor driven by two counterpropagating coupling fields. More than 60% of reflection efficiency is observed at the phase-matching angle. The underlying mechanism theoretically is investigated as the four-wave mixing is enhanced by the electromagnetically-induced transparency. Both of the two Doppler-free two-photon resonances (one for the probe and co-propagating fields, the other for the reflected and the counterpropagation fields) play an important role in satisfying the phase matching in the reflection direction. The phase compensation due to the anomalous dispersion and the decrease of effective absorption length in the atomic system allow the efficient reflection to be observed in a wide range of incident angles of the probe field and detunings of the coupling field.

Nondegenerate four-wave mixing (FWM) in diamond-type atomic systems has important applications in a wide range of fields, including quantum entanglement generation, frequency conversion, and optical information processing. Although the efficient self-seeded nondegenerate FWM with amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) has been realized extensively, the seeded nondegenerate FWM without ASE is inefficient in reported experiments so far. Here we present the experimental realization of the seeded nondegenerate FWM in cesium atoms with a significantly improved efficiency. Specifically, with two pump lasers at 852 and 921 nm and a seed laser at 895 nm, a continuous-wave laser at 876 nm is efficiently generated via FWM in a cesium vapor cell with a power up to 1.2 mW, three orders of magnitude larger than what has been achieved in previous experiments. The improvement of the efficiency benefits from the exact satisfaction of the phase-matching condition realized by an elaborately designed setup. Our results may find applications in the generation of squeezing and entanglement of light via nondegenerate FWM.

We report an experimental demonstration of optical two-dimensional coherent spectroscopy (2DCS) in cold atoms. The experiment integrates a collinear 2DCS setup with a magneto-optical trap (MOT), in which cold rubidium (Rb) atoms are prepared at a temperature of approximately 200 µK and a number density of 10¹⁰ cm⁻³. With a sequence of femtosecond laser pulses, we first obtain one-dimensional second- and fourth-order nonlinear signals and then acquire both one-quantum and zero-quantum 2D spectra of cold Rb atoms. The capability of performing optical 2DCS in cold atoms is an important step toward optical 2DCS study of many-body physics in cold atoms and ultimately in atom arrays and trapped ions. Optical 2DCS in cold atoms/molecules can also be a new avenue to probe chemical reaction dynamics in cold molecules.

GaN nucleation layers were grown on sapphire substrate by metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) with different carrier gas. The morphology of nucleation layer which is crucial to GaN crystal quality was systematically studied using nitrogen and hydrogen as carrier gas. The GaN nucleation layer tends to form larger islands under H₂ ambient, and forms higher density nucleation islands and thicker nucleation layer under N₂ ambient.