Metasurfaces offer a unique playground to tailor the electromagnetic field at subwavelength scale to control polarization, wavefront, and nonlinear processes. Tunability of the optical response of these structures is challenging due to the nanoscale size of their constitutive elements. A long-sought solution to achieve tunability at the nanoscale is all-optical modulation by exploiting the ultrafast nonlinear response of materials. However, the nonlinear response of materials is inherently very weak, and, therefore, requires optical excitations with large values of fluence. We show that by properly tuning the equilibrium optical response of a nonlocal metasurface, it is possible to achieve sizable variation of the photoinduced out-of-equilibrium optical response on the picosecond timescale employing fluences smaller than 250 μJ / cm², which is 1 order of magnitude lower than previous studies with comparable reflectivity variations in silicon platforms. Our results pave the way to fast devices with large modulation amplitude.

Recently, Kumar Gerry et al. [Phys. Rev. A 90, 033427 (2014) https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.90.033427] studied the coherence control in a six-level atom through solving the Schrödinger equation in the field-interaction representation. In this manuscript, we investigate the interaction between a six-level atomic system (SLAS) and a single-mode field initially prepared in a squeezed coherent state. We extend the Jeans–Cummings model to describe the interaction between the atom and the squeezed field (SF) and the system dynamics. We examine the time evolution of the atomic coherence, non-local correlation, statistical properties within the bipartite system in the presence and absence intensity-dependent coupling (I-DC) for different squeezing regimes of the field.

Quantum random number generators (QRNGs) can provide genuine randomness by exploiting the intrinsic probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, which play important roles in many applications. However, the true randomness acquisition could be subjected to attacks from untrusted devices involved or their deviations from the theoretical modeling in real-life implementation. We propose and experimentally demonstrate a source-device-independent QRNG, which enables one to access true random bits with an untrusted source device. The random bits are generated by measuring the arrival time of either photon of the time–energy entangled photon pairs produced from spontaneous parametric downconversion, where the entanglement is testified through the observation of nonlocal dispersion cancellation. In experiment, we extract a generation rate of 4 Mbps by a modified entropic uncertainty relation, which can be improved to gigabits per second by using advanced single-photon detectors. Our approach provides a promising candidate for QRNGs with no characterization or error-prone source devices in practice.