interdisciplinary Photonics Laboratories
University of Sydney
2010
June 2010 APOS 3 to be held in Sydney Australia. Reflecting the Australian success at APOS, and the strengthening ties in the region, the next APOS will be held outside of China in Sydney, Australia.
June 2010 Roberson Oliveiro wins Best Student Presentation at APOS The second Asia-Pacific Optical Senors (APOS) conference was held in Guanzho, China. APOS is the regional conference on optical sensing, held in alternate years with OFS. Roberson Oliveiro from iPL won the Best Student Presentation Award for his work on a novel viscometer based on acoustic modulation of a long period grating.
June 2010 New book on optical fibre sensing and interferometery is out: A. Michie, I. Basset, J. Canning, "Optical fibre sensing and interferometery", Lambert Academic Publishing, Germany. Available thorugh amazon.com.
May 2010 An outstanding student heads home and another arrives. Philip Orr has returned home after a successful 3 month project on compound phase shifted gratings for magnetic sensors. Here more about his impressions. We certainly enjoyed his visit and look forward to hosting more outstanding students from Scotland and the UK. Eric Lindner from the Institute for Photonics (IPHT) Jena Germany arrives as part of an ongoing collaboration in sensing for a two month visit. Not even the bellows of Iceland stopped the intrepid Eric from his first trip to the fabled land down under. Eric will work on regenerated gratings.
March 2010 Joint Japan-Australia Workshop on Frontier Photonics and Electronics held at the University of NSW, (4-5th March 2010). As part of the growing Australia-Asia relations, key groups in photonics and electronics accross Japan, Australia and China came together in a focussed workshop to bridge the links between electronics and photonics within telecommunications, sensing, security and space. With a special empahsis on students, presentations highlighted the value of photonics and electronics from helping spacecraft to land on asteroids to explaining the phenomenon of rogue waves taht strike ocean going vessels with sudden and violent force. The Workshop is now ISBN listed and a set of CD proceedings is forthcoming. Convenors and Program Chairs: Prof Kazuo Hotate, The
Feb 2010 Visiting Scholar Philip Orr from the Institute for Energy and Environment, Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow Scotland, has won a Macrobertson travelling scholarship to work with iPL on DFB structures for 2 months. The scholarship is jointly offered by Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities, Scotland UK.
2010 Summer internships offered from local photonics spin-off, Finisar Australia, which continues to grow despite global financial crisis, showing that commercial opportunities in photonics remain in Australia.
2010 Summer students: iPL congratulates and welcomes Robert Hannah and Jack Orford winners of Summer Scholarships from the School of Chemistry, University of Sydney, to work at IPL on novel porphyrin based photonics. iPL also welcomes Danijel Boskovic a summer student from UNSW who is currently undertaking a Nanotechnology degree.
2009
November 2009: Sydney University's WORLD magazine profiles its eye on European links, including photonic sensing at iPL. More
2009-2010 iPL welcomes Prof. Li BingXin from Department of Information Science and Engineering,
8 September 2009, Location: UNSW; Australia-China Joint Workshop on Optical Fibre Sensors for Industrial Applications. This workshop brings together Australian and Chinese researchers and engineers who are involved in several related international and industry collaborative projects in optical fibre and photonic sensors and their industrial applications. These collaborative projects have been sponsored by the Australian Government Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (DIISR) and its Chinese counterpart, the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), the Australian Research Council (ARC) and its Chinese counterpart, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NNSFC), and industry partners RTA and RailCorp in recent years. Organisers: Prof. Gang-Ding Peng (UNSW) & Prof. John Canning (Usyd).
iPL welcomes two new visiting scholars 2009-2010: Daniele Tossi - winner of an Australian Endeavour Research Fellowship. He arrives from Turin Polytechnic to work on sensors and lasers. Roberson Oliveiro - winner of a Brazil CAPES scholarship to spend one PhD year at iPL as part of an ongoing research collaboration between the University of Sydney and the Federal University of Technology (FUT), Brazil. ARC Linkage funding to Dr. 2009 Summer Scholarships Jacob Fenton, Andrew Danos, Chuek Ka Poon and James Ward won summer scholarships from both the ARC ARNAM funding for Dr. Kevin Cook. The ARC Australian Research Network for Advanced Materials (ARNAM) has awarded funding for Dr.
2004-2008
IPOS develops temperature insensitive opto fluidic devices in 2009 using technology pioneered in Denmark by iPL and DTU scientists in 2006. Work pioneered in Denmark in 2006 by Sorenson et al. proposed the use of liquids to alter the effective thermo-optic coefficient for tuning devices and for achieving temperture insensitivity for both structured optical fibres and photonic crystal waveguide devices. In a recent publication within Applied Physics Letters, IPOS researchers describe implementing this approach for optofluidic devcies made within photonic crystals. See the original paper in Optics Express: infobase
Large ISL grant awarded in major project to develop photonic sensors for the energy industries July 2008. In an international joint project between the
Anatol Zhabotinsky (1938-2008) was the "father of chemical nonlinear dynamics" and helped unravel the oscillating chemical reactions discovered by Boris Belousov in the 1950s. Quoting from the obituary writen by Irving Epstein "Ilya Prigogine — who received the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, in part for demonstrating that chemical systems far from equilibrium can exhibit periodic oscillations — regarded the BZ reaction as the most important scientific discovery of the twentieth century, surpassing quantum theory and relativity". This complexity was not confined to chemical reactions alone and underpinned many oscillating and chaotic behaviour in numerous systems, the basis for contemporary complexity theory.
Chemical oscillations are important in photonics - they underpin the dynamics of photosensitivity and, indeed, the prediction and observation of chemical oscillations in the solid state for the first time was reported in optical fibres: Canning et al. "Solid-state autocatalysis and oscillatory reactions in silicate glass systems", Optics Communications, V260 (2), 595-600, (2006). Without such complexity, the photosensitive response we see would not be possible.
A fascinating history of the BZ reaction can be downloaded from Prof. Pojman's website here, a film produced by
Optical Fiber Sensors 2008 held in
Visiting Professor works on fast tuning of gratings 2007-2008. Professor
The Society for Photonics (previously the Laser and ElectroOptics Society) celebrated 30yrs in 2007. 2007 saw the transition of IEEE LEOS into the Society for Photonics. In memory of this occasion a "rubiks" cube highlight key photonics facilities around the world was made. The chosen key optical fibre fabrication image was from the world class Optical Fibre Technolgoy Centre (OFTC) shut down at the University of Sydney. The 30th birthday was celebrated at the Annual General Meeting in the Photonics industry picks up downunder 2007. Brian Ashton joins Villum Kann Rasmussen Visiting Professorship 2007. John Canning has won a Villum Kann Rasmussen Professorship to work with Q-switch air clad fibre laser August 2006. Q-switched operation of a linear air-clad cavity demonstrated by ROC attracts Kevin Rudd, Opposition 2006 (Current prime minister 2008). Kevin Rudd, the current Labour opposition leader who would be prime minister in the upcoming federal elections, has put forward a somewhat visionary proposal to create a modernised super internet competitive with the rest of the world. For those of us who have been overseas and can compare what is available over there, this is a most welcome development to try and break the apparent impasse on the development of Australia’s internet infrastructure which has fallen so far behind so much of the rest of the world. In order to promote this development the Opposition Leader used as a backdrop one of the Australian Photonic’s CRC success stories – Redfern Optical Components whose origins stem from a project put forward by Dmitri Stepanov and Photonic crystal fibre depolarisers July 2006. Mamdouh Matar, a PhD student at the OFTC, has demonstrated potentially the first practical passive component using photonic crystal fibres. He has made Lyott depolarisers using hi birefringence photonic crystal fibre produced by a propriety method developed at iPL. The large birefringence possible with these fibres means that the required length for sufficient polarisation mixing is reduced compared to conventional fibre. The reduction is significant enough that a practical passive device for depolarising narrow linewidth sources becomes possible. Mamdouh has recently taken up an appointment with Redfern Optical Components (ROC) a spin-off from iPL. Gratings and photonic crystal fibres for orthodontic measurements 2006-2007. Maura Milczewski from Federal Technological University of Parana in
Sub-kHz distributed feedback photonic crystal fibre lasers 2006. DFB PCF lasers with linewidth as short as few kHZ have been demonstrated.
- Additional bandgap effects from the cladding.
- Access to the resonant fields of the DFB structure through the holes.
- Incorporation of other materials for active device processing and detection.
- Tailoring the macro response of the fibre properties by controlling the distribution and size of air holes for particular sensing applications.
- Simple engineering of birefringence for single mode operation.
Dual dispersion compensator and Raman amplifier 2005. Australia and
Through the Brazilian Giga Project the fibres will be tested in a recently completed sate-of-the-art optical systems test bed between two major Brazilian cities: Sao Paolo and
High temperature resistance gratings 2005. Custom-tailored phosphosilicate optical fibre Bragg grating written using hypersensitisation technology has survived continuous on/off use for over five years. In collaboration with Professor Hypolito Kalinowski of Federal Technological University of Parana-Brazil, a specially and off use for over four years in various research projects at
UPDATE 2008: These gratings are still operating more than seven years after fabrication.
Nanotechnology in a fibre 2005-2007. In a DEST funded ISL linkage centred at QCV, Melbourne University and involving iPL/OFTC, ANU Australia, Trinity College Dublin and Nanonics Israel, a new type of fibre, Fractal structured fibre, has been fabricated and subsequently tapered down to demonstrate the first feasible tip for increasing signal throughput in applications such as scanning near field optical microscopy (SNOM). The objective is to ultimately fabricate a new type of fibre optic tip that can provide for the first time real time raster imaging in SNOM. Currently, the signal accumulation time of existing technologies is so long that the capability for active image-based diagnostics with SNOM presently does not exist.
In achieving this goal the project consortium has also demonstrated the first successful tapering of photonic crystal fibres where the holes were confirmed open. Further, retainment of hole sizes truly in the nano domain (i.e. <100nm) were achieved enabling true nanotechnology in a fibre to become a reality. Nano- and eventually pico- structuring of silica in fibre form is now technically feasible opening up enormous possibilities for Australian research. Shortly after this work, scanning optical microscopy using fibre tips without metal was demonstrated. See publications page for more details.
Liquid core bandgap fibres and Fresnel fibre technology. Cicero Martelli, a PhD student at iPL and the Electrical Engineering Department of the University of Sydney, and colleagues demonstrated the first liquid core bandgap fibre based on a novel technique of selective hole filling of structured fibres. The fibre was a Fresnel fibre itself a leading innovation developed at iPL. These fibres control the diffractive properties of light not only to enable diffractive assisted shaping of the propagating near field within the fibre, but for the first time allowing control of the fibre output in the far field. In the simplest proof of principle, a chirped Bragg fibre design based on distribution of air holes along the virtual zones of the cylindrical waveguide (a subset of the generic Fresnel fibre) resulted in focussing of light at 1550nm.
This work demonstrated the clear advantage of Fresnel fibres with mode confinement spread across hole and glass rather than having the entire optical field within the hole, which limits the flexibility and range of practical sensing possible with bandgap fibre applications.
This precedent was followed up a year later by the demonstration of a liquid filled unchirped Bragg fibre in polymer at the OFTC. Although the demonstration used a non-optimal bandgap fibre design and no selectivity was demonstrated in the hole filling, it nonetheless affirms the feasibility of Fresnel fibre technology for sensing in other materials as well as silica. iPL was the first to recognise and champion the development of polymer and soft glass fibre technology as an ideal pathway for prototyping eventual silica fibre technology. To reach this end, we have several patents in polymer photonic crystal fibre fabrication an activity driven by our colleagues at OFTC.
Fresnel fibre technology signals a new paradigm in fibre technology where the possibility of having true all-fibre technology where no optical components are necessary is now technically conceivable. A review of this technology is now available. More
Organic electronics in a fibre 2006. Molecular electronics in a fibre opens up an opportunity to bring together the electronic and non-linear properties of porphyrin structures with the optical guiding properties of photonic crystal fibres and planar waveguides. In a significant collaboration with Prof. Max Crossley's group at the
France-Australia science technology project on photosensitivity with UV & femtosecond lasers 2006-2008. PhD student
Danish Otto Monsted Fond Professorship 2004. John Canning won an Otto Monsted Fond Visiting Professorship to work at the Research Centre COM at the
The technique of precision phase shifting during holographic writing was developed.
A comprehensive review of UV induced birefringence within hydrogen loaded optical fibre for both polarisation eigenstates of the laser writing beam was carried out. This was accompanied by annealing experiments that revealed this induced birefringence is far less stable than the induced index change, decoupling the two. A new interpretation based on hydrogen depletion through anisotropic reactions assisted by laser birefringence that satisfies all the experimental results and previous literature was presented.
The first demonstration of complexity and oscillatory behaviour in a solid medium that does not involve decomposition of the medium was demonstrated. This work caught the attention of world leading experts in complexity who invited us to submit the work at the leading chaos and non-linear dynamics conference.
The work is published in various journals and conference papers.
