The AiPT research seminars bring together international experts and AiPT staff, fostering an environment of knowledge sharing and discovery across a range of diverse topics. The AiPT research seminars continue to promote scientific dialogue and engagement among the global research community, ensuring that AiPT remains at the forefront of innovation and discovery in the fields of photonics and telecommunications.
AIPT Upcoming Seminars in 2025
Silicon photonics is the technology of light on a silicon chip. The technology has been successfully commercialised in transceivers for data centres and is poised to impact a plethora of emerging applications including LiDAR, health-tech, quantum computing and environmental monitoring, with multiple market projections pointing towards growth rates of 20-25% over the coming years. This represents an opportunity to innovate in the field, including in the integration of new materials with silicon photonics. This overview presentation will introduce the field of silicon photonics, outline some of the research work ongoing at the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton in the field, and highlight opportunities to collaborate in silicon photonics. Topics include world-record speed plasma dispersion effect silicon modulators, novel MOSCAP silicon modulators, highly sensitive LiDAR, mid-infrared silicon photonics for sensing applications and low power programmable photonics.
In addition, this presentation will introduce the CORNERSTONE Photonics Innovation Centre programme and summarise how you can benefit from the programme via fabrication services, start-up support, training, and access to funding to support academic-industrial collaborations.
Coherent and incoherent nonlinear optical effects play important role in photonics, laser physics and quantum optics. However, nonlinear optical applications are limited by the available choice of naturally occurring materials and their generally weak nonlinear response. Weak nonlinearity of conventional materials can be enhanced by their nanostructuring or through metamaterial approach. Plasmonic and dielectric nanostructures provide numerous opportunities for designing optical response in both linear and nonlinear regimes. Combining dissimilar plasmonic and dielectric materials in one nanostructure offers additional prospects for devising optical properties and achieving functionalities not attainable otherwise. Here, we will discuss plasmonic nano- and meta-materials for tailoring hot-electron dynamics, plasmonic nonlinearities, and ultrashort pulse manipulation. Going beyond traditional field enhancement effects, we show how the introduction of additional hot-electron relaxation pathways, anisotropy and nonlocality allows to accelerate or decelerate the temporal response of nonlinear optical effects in plasmonic nanostructures. The metamaterial designs for controlling ultrafast pulse propagation with metamaterials will also be discussed. The ultrafast optical and electronic processes in plasmonic nanostructures may find applications in nonlinear photonics, photocatalysis and development of time-varying media.
Light revolutionized our vision of technology. Carrying five internal degrees of freedom, it offers unlimited capabilities in light-matter interactions. The recent advances in coherent light sources enable remarkable progress in harnessing degrees of freedom and boost light-induced applications. The further increasing demand in controlling the light states catalyzes technological innovations in laser-based systems. In this presentation, I will focus on our efforts in developing high-power laser systems based on the active double-clad tapered fibers with excellent control of light states in temporal and spatial domains. The special geometrical architecture of tapered fibers enables the direct amplification of picosecond pulses from tens of milliwatts to over half-kW levels in a single amplification stage preserving excellent output spatial and polarization characteristics. The spun tapered fiber features low birefringence resulting in improved polarization stability at high power levels. Moreover, this geometrical architecture empowers the generation and simultaneous amplification of structured light, maintaining both complex polarization profiles and spatial intensity distribution. Our recent results show that the structured light can also be coherently combined, enabling power scaling in analogy with the Gaussian beam and providing beams with higher modal purity.
Past Seminars
Speaker: Prof Logan Wright, Yale University, Department of Applied Physics
Title: The high-dimensional future of light
Speaker: Dr Andreas Wuestefeld, Technology Lead – Fiber Optics at NORSAR
Title: Applications of Fibre Sensing for Solving Modern Societal Challenges
Speaker: Dr. Giulia Marcucci, University of Glasgow
Title: Riding the Wave of Green Change: Advancing Wave-Based Analog Reservoir Computing for Sustainable AI
Date: 9 January 2025
Speaker: Dr Julia Lehman, University of Birmingham
Title:Mid-infrared Frequency Comb Spectroscopy: Spectrometer Development and Applications in Chemistry
Date: 8 January 2025
Speaker: Dr Angeles Camacho Rosales, Coractive Inc, Canada
Title: Specialty optical fiber technologies, industrial overview
Date: 20 November 2024
Speaker: Dr Antonio Hurtado, UKRI Turing AI Fellow, Institute of Photonics, Dept of Physics, University of Strathclyde
Title: Photonic Spiking Neurons and Spiking Neural Networks for High-Speed Neuromorphic Technologies
Date: 20 November 2024
Speaker: Assoc Prof Ugur Tegin, Koç University (Turkey)
Title: Tunable and scalable optical computing with linear and nonlinear optical dynamics
Date: 18 Nov 2024
Speaker: Prof Alina Karabchevsky, Ben-Gurion Univerity (BGU)
Title: Advancing Light-Matter Interaction with Photonic Chips
Date: 24 October 2024
Speaker: Prof Massimiliano Guasoni, ORC Southhampton
Title: Optically Reconfigurable Photonics in Optical Fibers
Date: 23 October 2024
Speaker: Prof. Sahin Özdemir, Saint Louis University, USA
Title: Non-Hermiticity as a Resource for Photonics
Date: 16 October 2024
Speaker: Prof. Sahin Özdemir, Saint Louis University, USA
Title: Non-Hermiticity as a Resource for Photonics
Date: 16 October 2024
Speaker: Prof Takeshi Yasui, Institute of Post-LED Photonics (pLED), Tokushima University, Japan
Title: “Century of light” pioneered by invisible light
Date: 30 September 2024
Speaker: Dr Yu Tokizane, Institute of Post-LED Photonics (pLED), Tokushima University, Japan
Title: Wireless communication utilizing terahertz waves generated through a Kerr micro-resonator soliton comb
Date: 30 September 2024
Speaker: Dr Eiji Hase, Institute of Post-LED Photonics (pLED), Tokushima University, Japan
Title: Application of dual-comb technique for scan-less confocal imaging of amplitude and phase
Date: 30 September 2024
Speaker: Prof Pavlo Mikheenko, University of Oslo, Norway
Title: Nanosuperconductivity and nanophotonics in biological systems
Date: 19 September 2024
Speaker: Prof Julien Javaloyes, Universitat de les Illes Balears (Spain)
Title: Coherence and multiplicity of frequency combs in Harmonic Mode-Locked lasers
Date: 19 July 2024
Speaker: Andrey Matsko, California Institute of Technology (CalTech), US
Title: Theory and applications of hyperparametric microwave photonic oscillators
Date: 4 June 2024
Speaker: Professor Daniel Elson, Imperial College London
Title: Spectrally-and polarization-resolved imaging in vivo-providing surgical guidance using vision and robotics
Date: 16 May 2024
Speaker: Prof Francesco Pavone, University of Florence
Title: Morpho-chemical tissue imaging
Date: 9 May 2024
Speaker: Dr Victoria Barygina, University of Florence
Title: Skin signaling: a study in controlled cell co-cultures and detection in vivo
Date: 9 May 2024
Speaker: Dr Mitchell Cox, PhD (Wits), SMIEEE, Optica Ambassador
Title: Towards long range free‐space optical communications at the Wits OC Lab
Date: 30 April 2024
Speaker: Professor Juergen Popp, Friedrich-Schiller University, Institute of Physical Chemistry and Abbe School of Photonics, Germany; Leibniz-Institute of Photonic Technology Jena, a member of the Leibniz Research Alliance Leibniz Health Technology, German
Title: Raman spectroscopy for translational medicine
Date: 15 April 2024
Speaker: Dr. Pedro Parra-Rivas, Università La Sapienza, Roma, Italy
Title: From temporal to spatiotemporal dissipative solitons: a bifurcation journey in optical resonators
Date: 7 March 2024
Speaker: Dr Feng Wen, Key Lab of Optical Fiber Sensing and Communications, Ministry of Education, School of Information and Communication Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
Title: Signal processing technologies in mode division multiplexing systems
Date: 20 February 2024
Speaker: Dr. Maria Chernysheva, Leibniz Institute of Photonics Technology, Jena, Germany
Title: Trends and prospectives of ultrafast fibre laser development and applications in Leibniz Institute of Photonics Technology
Date: 19 February 2024
Speaker: Dr Kouichi Akahane, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (Japan)
Title: Semiconductor quantum dot lasers operating in the telecom band
Date: 25 January 2024
AiPT Seminar Series
The AiPT team organises a series of scientific seminars covering a wide range of topics, from experimental and theoretical challenges in photonics to industrial applications. If you are interested in collaborating with our team and would like to deliver a talk, please contact the AiPT Seminar Chair, Dr Auro Perego, at a.perego1@aston.ac.uk