The extraordinary electronic properties of graphene provided the main thrusts for the rapid advance of graphene electronics. In photonics, the gate-controllable electronic properties of graphene provide a route to efficiently manipulate the interaction of photons with graphene, which has recently sparked keen interest in graphene plasmonics. However, the electro-optic tuning capability of unpatterned graphene alone is still not strong enough for practical optoelectronic applications owing to its non-resonant Drude-like behaviour. Here, we demonstrate that substantial gate-induced persistent switching and linear modulation of terahertz waves can be achieved in a two-dimensional metamaterial, into which an atomically thin, gated two-dimensional graphene layer is integrated. The gate-controllable light-matter interaction in the graphene layer can be greatly enhanced by the strong resonances of the metamaterial. Although the thickness of the embedded single-layer graphene is more than six orders of magnitude smaller than the wavelength (<λ/1,000,000), the one-atom-thick layer, in conjunction with the metamaterial, can modulate both the amplitude of the transmitted wave by up to 47% and its phase by 32.2° at room temperature. More interestingly, the gate-controlled active graphene metamaterials show hysteretic behaviour in the transmission of terahertz waves, which is indicative of persistent photonic memory effects.

Gram-negative bacteria actively secrete outer membrane vesicles, spherical nano-meter-sized proteolipids enriched with outer membrane proteins, to the surroundings. Outer membrane vesicles have gained wide interests as non-living complex vaccines or delivery vehicles. However, no study has used outer membrane vesicles in treating cancer thus far. Here we investigate the potential of bacterial outer membrane vesicles as therapeutic agents to treat cancer via immunotherapy. Our results show remarkable capability of bacterial outer membrane vesicles to effectively induce long-term antitumor immune responses that can fully eradicate established tumors without notable adverse effects. Moreover, systematically administered bacterial outer membrane vesicles specifically target and accumulate in the tumor tissue, and subsequently induce the production of antitumor cytokines CXCL10 and interferon-γ. This antitumor effect is interferon-γ dependent, as interferon-γ-deficient mice could not induce such outer membrane vesicle-mediated immune response. Together, our results herein demonstrate the potential of bacterial outer membrane vesicles as effective immunotherapeutic agent that can treat various cancers without apparent adverse effects.

This review demonstrates directional photofluidization lithography (DPL), which makes it possible to fabricate a generic and sophisticated micro/nanoarchitecture that would be difficult or impossible to attain with other methods. In particular, DPL differs from many of the existing micro/nanofabrication methods in that the post-treatment (i.e., photofluidization), after the preliminary fabrication process of the original micro/nanostructures, plays a pivotal role in the various micro/nanostructural evolutions including the deterministic reshaping of architectures, the reduction of structural roughness, and the dramatic enhancement of pattern resolution. Also, DPL techniques are directly compatible with a parallel and scalable micro/nanofabrication. Thus, DPL with such extraordinary advantages in micro/nanofabrication could provide compelling opportunities for basic micro/nanoscale science as well as for general technology applications.

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Entanglement between quantum and classical objects is of special interest in the context of fundamental studies of quantum mechanics and potential applications to quantum information processing. In quantum optics, single photons are treated as light quanta while coherent states are considered the most classical among all pure states. Recently, entanglement between a single photon and a coherent state in a free-traveling field was identified to be a useful resource for optical quantum information processing. However, it was pointed out to be extremely difficult to generate such states since it requires a clean cross-Kerr nonlinear interaction. Here, we devise and experimentally demonstrate a scheme to generate such hybrid entanglement by implementing a coherent superposition of two distinct quantum operations. The generated states clearly show entanglement between the two different types of states. Our work opens a way to generate hybrid entanglement of a larger size and to develop efficient quantum information processing using such a new type of qubits.Quantum entanglement is of crucial importance for fundamental tests of quantum mechanics and implementations of quantum information processing. The idea of entangling "classical" and "quantum" states is found in Schrödinger's famous cat paradox [1], where a microscopic atom -as a quantum particle-and a cat -as a classical object-were assumed to be entangled to each other. In quantum optics, coherent states are considered the most classical among all pure states [2]. In many situations they can be treated semi-classically, i.e. as a classical light field with the addition of stochastic noise, and are typically most robust against decoherence [3]. On the other hand, single photons are normally treated as discrete light quanta containing the minimum quantized amount of energy available at a given frequency and any attempt to describe them with an effective noise theory leads to negative probabilities.Recently, entanglement between a single photon and a coherent state was identified to be a very useful resource for optical quantum information processing, enabling one to perform nearly deterministic quantum teleportation and universal gate operations for quantum computation using linear optics [4]. This type of hybrid entanglement, however, is difficult to generate in spite of its conceptual interest and potential usefulness. It is well known that a clean cross-Kerr type interaction between a single photon and a coherent state may generate such a state [5,6]. However, many fundamental problems lie in the way of realizing a suitable interaction of this kind [7][8][9]. Therefore, an experimentally accessible scheme to replace the cross-Kerr nonlinearity and create entanglement between a single photon and a coherent state would be highly desirable. In this article, we introduce such a scheme and use it to experimentally generate small-scale hybrid entanglement. We also outline extensions whereby our methods can be generalized to produce larger scale hybrid entanglement.Th...