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Acousto-optic modulation in piezoelectric materials offers the efficient method to bridge electrical and optical signals. It is widely used to control optical frequencies and intensities in modern optical systems includingQ-switch lasers, ion traps, and optical tweezers. It is also critical for emerging applications such as quantum photonics and non-reciprocal optics. Acousto-optic devices have recently been demonstrated with promising performance on integrated platforms. However, the conversion efficiency of optical signals remains low in these integrated devices. This is attributed to the significant challenge in realizing large mode overlap, long interaction length, and high power robustness at the same time. Here, we develop acousto-optic devices with gallium nitride on a sapphire substrate. The unique capability to confine both optical and acoustic fields in sub-wavelength scales without suspended structures allows efficient acousto-optic interactions over long distances under high driving power. This leads to the complete optical conversion with integrated acousto-optic modulators. With the unidirectional phase matching, we also demonstrate the non-reciprocal propagation of optical fields with isolation ratios above 10 dB. This work provides a robust and efficient acousto-optic platform, opening new opportunities for optical signal processing, quantum transduction, and non-magnetic optical isolation.

Many RNAs function through RNA–RNA interactions. Fast and reliable RNA structure prediction with consideration of RNA–RNA interaction is useful, however, existing tools are either too simplistic or too slow. To address this issue, we present LinearCoFold, which approximates the complete minimum free energy structure of two strands in linear time, and LinearCoPartition, which approximates the cofolding partition function and base pairing probabilities in linear time. LinearCoFold and LinearCoPartition are orders of magnitude faster than RNAcofold. For example, on a sequence pair with combined length of 26,190 nt, LinearCoFold is 86.8× faster than RNAcofold MFE mode, and LinearCoPartition is 642.3× faster than RNAcofold partition function mode. Surprisingly, LinearCoFold and LinearCoPartition’s predictions have higher PPV and sensitivity of intermolecular base pairs. Furthermore, we apply LinearCoFold to predict the RNA–RNA interaction between SARS-CoV-2 genomic RNA (gRNA) and human U4 small nuclear RNA (snRNA), which has been experimentally studied, and observe that LinearCoFold’s prediction correlates better with the wet lab results than RNAcofold’s.

The frequency degree of freedom of optical photons has been recently explored for efficient quantum information processing. Significant reduction in hardware resources and enhancement of quantum functions can be expected by leveraging the large number of frequency modes. Here, we develope an integrated photonic platform for the generation and parallel processing of quantum frequency combs (QFCs). Cavity-enhanced parametric down-conversion with Sagnac configuration is implemented to generate QFCs with identical spectral distributions. On-chip quantum interference of different frequency modes is simultaneously realized with the same photonic circuit. High interference visibility is maintained across all frequency modes with the identical circuit setting. This enables the on-chip reconfiguration of QFCs. By deterministically separating QFCs without spectral filtering, we further demonstrate high-dimensional Hong-Ou-Mandel effect. Our work provides the critical step for the efficient implementation of quantum information processing with integrated photonics using the frequency degree of freedom.