As is necessary this time of year, I reflected on my favorite optics/photonics and laser physics publications of this past year. Definitely not an exhaustive list, and heavily biased by my favorite topics and specialization (ultrafast optics, laser-plasma interactions, particle beam physics), these 12 articles and letters were the most interesting to me this year. I list them in chronological order of publication, to try to give a feeling of the flow of 2018.
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End of year 2017, Nature Photonics
Broadband gate-tunable terahertz plasmons in graphene heterostructures
26 Feb, Nature Photonics
Giant multiphoton absorption for THz resonances in silicon hydrogenic donors
12 March, Nature Photonics
Spatiotemporal control of laser intensity
02 April, Nature Photonics
Segmented terahertz electron accelerator and manipulator (STEAM)
06 April, Nature Communications
Control of laser plasma accelerated electrons for light sources
7 May, Optics Express
Wavefront degradation of a 200 TW laser from heat-induced deformation of in-vacuum compressor gratings
29 May, Optica
Thermodynamic control of soliton dynamics in liquid-core fibers
28 June, Physical Review Letters
Extreme Ultraviolet Beam Enhancement by Relativistic Surface Plasmons
29 August, Physical Review Letters
Tilted Electron Pulses
14 Sep, Optics Express
Molecular gases for pulse compression in hollow core fibers
27 Sep, Nature
Extremely efficient terahertz high-harmonic generation in graphene by hot Dirac fermions
7 Nov, Optica
Ultrahigh-efficiency wavelength conversion in nanophotonic periodically poled lithium niobate waveguides
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I can’t wait to see what 2019 has in store for the optics/photonics and lasers community.