Fiber Sensors & Supercontinuum Group

 

Our plastic microstructured optical fibers (MOFs) can be used as biosensors to sense, for example antibodies and DNA, for sound, stress, and temperature sensors, and we are currently developing industrial fiber-optical microphones and accelerometers.   Another focus area is supercontinuum generation in MOFs, through which a laser pulse is spectrally broadened to ultimately become white light, brighter than the sun, yet still as powerful as a laser. We develop new fiber materials (polymer, softglass) for novel supercontinuum sources operating, e.g., in the mid-IR.   We also work on novel nonlinear methods for generating ultra-short few-cycle fs laser pulses in the visible and near-IR. The pulses must be generated with low-cost and stable equipment, such as high-power fiber lasers, and the pulses are compressed in a single quadratic nonlinear crystal.

Our main University partners: Cornell University (Frank Wise) Australian National University (Wieslaw Krolikowski) Université de Franche-Comté (John Dudley)