Abstract
A monolithic lab-on-a-chip fabricated by femtosecond laser micromachining capable of label-free biosensing is reported. The device is entirely made of fused silica, and consists of a microdisk resonator integrated inside a microfluidic channel. Whispering gallery modes are excited by the evanescent field of a circular suspended waveguide, also incorporated within the channel. Thermal annealing is performed to decrease the surface roughness of the microstructures to a nanometric scale, thereby reducing intrinsic losses and maximizing the Q-factor. Further, thermally-induced morphing is used to position, with submicrometric precision, the suspended waveguide tangent to the microresonator to enhance the spatial overlap between the evanescent field of both optical modes. With this fabrication method and geometry, the alignment between the waveguide and the resonator is robust and guaranteed at all instances. A maximum sensitivity of 121.5 nm/RIU was obtained at a refractive index of 1.363, whereas near the refractive index range of water-based solutions the sensitivity is 40 nm/RIU. A high Q-factor of 10(5) is kept throughout the entire measurement range.

Abstract
Background: This study aims to evaluate food waste and menu quality in two canteens (A and B) from a Portuguese public university in order to identify challenges and opportunities to improve the food service. Methods: Food waste included the analysis of two canteens over 5 consecutive days by selective aggregate weighing. A qualitative evaluation of a 5-week menu cycle related to lunches was performed through the Qualitative Evaluation of Menus (AQE-d) method. Results: Both menus have "satisfactory " evaluations and lower adequacy to the dietary guidelines in criteria A, which evaluates general items from the dish, and in criteria B, which evaluates meat, fish and eggs. The calculated mean of food waste in both canteens exceeded the acceptable limit of 10%, except for the vegetarian (7.5%) dish in canteen A. The biggest waste was found in the vegetarian dish (16.8%) in canteen A. In meat dishes the conduit presents more waste (17.0%) than in fish and vegetarian dishes. Among these, the vegetables were the most wasted (25.3% and 27.9%, respectively). Conclusion: This work presents some insights to future interventions in the direction of a healthier and more sustainable foodservice.

Abstract
In this work we use the concept of paraxial fluids of light to explore quantum turbulence, probing a turbulent regime induced on an optical beam propagating inside a defocusing nonlinear media. For that purpose, we establish a physical analogue of a two-component quantum fluid by making use of orthogonal polarizations and incoherent beam interaction, obtaining a system for which the perturbative excitations follow a modified Bogoliubov-like dispersion relation. This dispersion relation features regions of instability that define an effective range of energy injection and that are easily tuned by manipulating the relative angle of incidence between the two components. Our numerical results support the predictions and show evidence of direct and inverse turbulent cascades expected from weak wave turbulence theories, which may inspire new ways to explore to quantum turbulence with optical analogues.

Abstract
Reservoir computing is a promising framework that facilitates the approach to physical neuromorphic hardware by enabling a given nonlinear physical system to act as a computing platform. In this work, we exploit this paradigm to propose a versatile and robust soliton-based computing system using a discrete soliton chain as a reservoir. By taking advantage of its tunable governing dynamics, we show that sufficiently strong nonlinear dynamics allows our soliton-based solution to perform accurate regression and classification tasks of non-linear separable datasets. At a conceptual level, the results presented pave a way for the physical realization of novel hardware solutions and have the potential to inspire future research on soliton-based computing using various physical platforms, leveraging its ubiquity across multiple fields of science, from nonlinear optical media to quantum systems.

Abstract
In the last three decades, a lot of research has been devoted to the optical response of an atomic media in near-to-resonant conditions and to how nonlinear optical properties are enhanced in these systems. However, as current research turns its attention towards multi-level and multidimensional systems interacting with several electromagnetic fields, the ever-increasing complexity of these problems makes it difficult to treat the semiclassical model of the Maxwell-Bloch equations analytically without any strongly-limiting approximations. Thus, numerical methods and particularly robust and fast computational tools, capable of addressing such class of modern and future problems in photonics, are mandatory. In this paper, we describe the development and implementation of a Maxwell-Bloch numerical solver that exploits the massive parallelism of the GPUs to tackle efficiently problems in multidimensional settings or featuring Doppler broadening effects. This constitutes a simulation tool that is capable of addressing a vast class of problems with considerable reduction of simulation time, featuring speedups up to 15 compared with the same codes running on a CPU.

Abstract
Nonminimally coupled curvature-matter gravity models are an interesting alternative to the theory of general relativity to address the dark energy and dark matter cosmological problems. These models have complex field equations that prevent a full analytical study. Nonetheless, in a particular limit, the behavior of a matter distribution can, in these models, be described by a Schrodinger-Newton system. In nonlinear optics, the Schrodinger-Newton system can be used to tackle a wide variety of relevant situations, and several numerical tools have been developed for this purpose. Interestingly, these methods can be adapted to study general relativity problems as well as its extensions. In this work, we report the use of these numerical tools to study a particular nonminimal coupling model that introduces two new potentials, an attractive Yukawa potential, and a repulsive potential proportional to the energy density. Using the imaginary-time propagation method, we have shown that static solutions arise even at low energy density regimes.