About the project
This research project will follow the development of silicon devices fabricated both from conventional planar waveguides on-chip as well as those based on an emerging platform that incorporates semiconductor materials directly into the cores of optical fibres.
In particular, the silicon fibre platform offers a unique possibility to seamlessly link semiconductor technologies with the silica fibre infrastructures that are used to transmit light around the globe – one of the key challenges facing the mass uptake of integrated photonic chips.
Silicon photonics is fast becoming one of the most active areas of research, offering optoelectronic solutions for a wide range of applications not only in telecoms, but also in medicine, imaging, spectroscopy, and sensing. Within this field, a subdivision that is gaining increased momentum is nonlinear silicon photonics as the semiconductor material displays a number of important nonlinear effects that can be used to generate and process signals at ultrafast speeds.
The work will have elements of:
- waveguide design
- component fabrication and optimization
- optical characterization and device benchmarking using both experimental and numerical tools.
The role will be integrated within our team of dynamic and skilled researchers.
There will be opportunities to interact with our National and International collaborators.
The Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) is the leading photonics research institute in the UK. It comprises state-of-the-art cleanrooms for optical fibre, planar photonics, silicon and bio-photonics fabrication and over 80 laboratories. Computer simulations will benefit from Southampton’s high performance computing cluster Iridis, one of the largest supercomputers in the UK.
A PhD at the ORC has enabled our past graduates to make successful careers in academia, in national scientific laboratories, and as scientists or business leaders in industry. Our research papers, patents, spin-off companies and these successful alumni taken together place Southampton amongst the top institutes worldwide.
