Journal updates

Quantum technologies are expected to lead to a step change in human capabilities in applications in computing, communication, and sensing. Photonics is one of the most promising platforms for quantum technologies as photons travel at the fastest possible speed and readily protected from decoherence. In the past years, quantum photonics has achieved significant development, including loophole free Bell tests, satellite quantum communications over thousands of kilometers, and quantum computing outperforms the world’s most powerful supercomputer by orders of magnitude for a specific task.

The study of quantum photonics now spans various multidisciplinary fields in the fundamental research of quantum information processing, technological investigation of integrated quantum photonics, and emerging applications from quantum chemical simulation to ultra-high resolution sensing. To highlight the exciting developments in this field and to promote the diverse applications of quantum photonics, Associate Prof. Yunhong Ding (Technical University of Denmark) and Assistant Prof. Jianwei Wang (Peking University) are organizing a special issue on Recent Advances in Quantum Photonics. 

Microresonators are resonators that confine light in micrometer scale mode volume. Microresoantors have become one of the most important elements in nanophotonics and integrated optics technology, including filters, sensors, lasers, optical switches, etc. Geometries as well as material platforms of microresonators are surprisingly diverse, ranging from micro-posts/disks/spheres/toroids/rings, Fabry−Perot and photonic crystal cavities to microcavities on regular/irregular polygonal nanocrystals or even topologically curved surface, and materials from silica, silicon, silicon nitride, lithium niobite, diamond, AlN, crystalline materials including CaF2 and MgF2, to III-V semiconductor materials such as AlGaAs. Extreme light confinement by light circulations can significantly enhance light-matter interaction and leads to interesting yet useful phenomena such as dissipative Kerr soliton combs, harmonic generations etc. Combined with new physics from non-Hermitian systems and other disciplines, enhancement performances at optical/phonon lasing, sensing, exotic light propagation have been demonstrated. In order to promote research on the fundamental physics of microresonators and related applications for photonics and beyond, Prof. Heng Zhou (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China) and Prof. Jing Xu (Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China) are planning to organize a special issue on Microresonators for photonic applications and beyond. 

In order to best serve our authors and readers and to meet research funder requirements, we are pleased to announce that Frontiers of Optoelectronics is moving to full Open Access (OA) publication from Jan 2022 on. This means that all content published in the journal is published under an open-access license, and freely available to readers worldwide, enabling the widest possible dissemination and reuse. 

We are also happy to tell you that the APC for the accepted manuscript will be fully sponsored by Higher Education Press and Huazhong University of Science and Technology. We thank you for all your support of the journal and look forward to witnessing the future development of the journal with you.

*Note on archive articles: Articles published prior to 2022 remain paywalled, and rights and permissions remain under original copyright, ​Higher Education Press.

Organic materials possess the flexibility, adjustable performance through molecular design, environmental friendliness, potentially low-cost, recyclability, etc. The conjugated organic materials enabled the charge dissociation, recombination, transfer and storage, and hence endowed them great opportunities for various applications in optoelectronics. In order to promote research on organic materials and the related applications in optoelectronics, Prof. Chengliang Wang (Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China) and Prof. Yinhua Zhou (Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China) are planning to organize a special issue on organic optoelectronics. Submission deadline is December 15, 2021.

In the past half century, silicon-based microelectronic integrated circuit technology and optical fiber communication technology have triggered a far-reaching information technology revolution, which has made human society enter the information age of rapid development. People's demand for communication capacity and speed is growing exponentially. Data center and high-performance computing are facing the bottleneck of speed, bandwidth and energy consumption of electrical interconnection. Silicon based optical interconnection has become the key technology to break through this bottleneck. Silicon's advantages of high refractive index, capable of small active components, and CMOS compatible process makes it possible to realize large-scale optoelectronic integration on chip with low cost, which has become a hot spot in the industry. In addition, silicon-based optoelectronics show great potential in a series of new fields such as mid-infrared communication, microwave photonics, nonlinear optics, biochemical sensing, quantum communication and quantum computing, optical lidar, optical neural network, spectral analysis and detection, astronomical optics, etc. To highlight the exciting developments in this field and to promote the diverse applications of silicon photonics, Prof. Dingshan Gao (Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China) and Prof. Zhiping Zhou (Peking University, China) are organizing a special issue on Recent Advances in Silicon Photonics. Submission deadline is June 15, 2021.

Fibers are one of the most fundamental material forms that are used in multitude of applications, ranging from fabrics to telecommunications, from hanging the bridges to monitoring their structural integrity, etc. In recent years, major breakthroughs were made which demonstrated fibers with novel optical, electronic, acoustic and cell interfacing properties that enable new functionalities. Functional fiber and related application research are at the crossroads of many disciples, including optics, materials science, device physics, nanotechnology, and fluid dynamics. Along with the evolution of functional fibers, come new ways of thinking about the manufacturing process itself. While this field is still in its initial stages of development, there has been tremendous recent progress. To highlight the exciting developments in this field and to promote the diverse applications of functional fibers, Prof. Lei Wei (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), Prof. Guangming Tao (Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China), Prof. Chong Hou (Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China), and Dr. Wei Yan (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA) are organizing a special issue on Recent Advances in Functional Fibers. Submission deadline is March 31, 2021.

Perovskite compounds have been studied for decades, but extensive attention was aroused only after the discovery of high-efficiency solar cells. In order to promote further research into the basic physics of perovskite materials for novel designs of high performance optoelectronic devices, Prof. Jiang Tang and Prof. Dehui Li (Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China) are organizing a special issue on halide perovskites: from materials to optoelectronic devices. Submission deadline is March 30, 2020.

Terahertz frequency region has attracted considerable interest, due to its unique nature and promising applications. Many breakthroughs were achieved in the past decades, including high performance sources, sensitive detectors, functional devices, interaction with matters as well as plenty applications. More recently, along with dawn of 6G applications, terahertz science and technology has been paid much more attention than ever before. In order to promote research in the area of Terahertz Science and Applications, Prof. Xinliang Zhang (Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China) and Prof. Xiaojun Wu (Beihang University, China) are planning to produce a special issue on Terahertz Science and Applications. Submission deadline is August 15, 2020.

Biomedical optics is a highly interdisciplinary field where physicists, chemists, biologists, physicians and engineers work together to develop optical principle and tools to solve the problems appearing in biology and medicine. It reveals the mechanism of disease occurrence by optical means, develops new diagnostic and therapeutic methods, and promotes the transformation of medicine and biology. The focus of this issue is to provide an interdisciplinary forum for state-of-the-art developments in both fundamental and technological biophotonics areas including the recent progress and trends in advanced biomedical imaging, sensing, spectroscopy, diagnostics, therapeutics, and instrumentation as well as in the modern field of nano-imaging and nano-sensing. Submission deadline is August 31, 2020.

Optical metasurfaces, composed of planar arrays of sub-wavelength dielectric or metallic structures that collectively mimic the operation of conventional bulk optical elements, have revolutionized the field of optics by their potential in constructing high-efficiency and multi-functional optoelectronic systems with a compact form factor. By engineering the geometry, placement and alignment of its constituent elements, an optical metasurface arbitrarily controls the magnitude, polarization, phase, angular momentum, or dispersion of an incident light. The study of metasurface now spans various multidisciplinary fields in both fundamental research on light-matter interaction, and emerging applications from solid-state LiDAR to compact imaging and spectroscopy devices. To highlight the exciting developments in this field and to promote the diverse applications of metasurfaces, Prof. Cheng Zhang (Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China) and Prof. Din-Ping Tsai (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China) are organizing a special issue on Recent Advances in Optical Metasurfaces. Submission deadline is November 15, 2020.