Facilities

We have recently commissioned a brand-new clean-room for the fabrication of photonic crystal fibre (both from silica and from soft compound glasses), with three drawing towers, an MCVD lathe and a preform assembly room. We also have extensive equipment for thermal post-processing of PCF, including tapering, selective hole collapse and inflation, rocking filter fabrication and the creation of low-loss transitions. There is also a broad range of tunable and fixed-frequency pulsed (fs to ns, visible to IR) laser systems, supercontinuum sources, optical spectrum analysers and test equipment, together with a Hitachi scanning electron microscope and a dual-beam focused ion-beam etching machine. We have a wide range of different set-ups for characterising the optical properties of the fibres, as well as researching their applications. Accessible within the institute is an extensive suite of equipment for semiconductor growth, electron-beam direct-writing, laser writing and reactive ion etching.

Below is a list of major equipment available in our group:

Fabrication and characterization of fibres

  • clean-room laboratory
  • two state-of-the-art fiber drawing towers for silica PCF
  • one drawing tower for soft-glass fibers (<1300°C)
  • horizontal glass-working lathe
  • Hitachi  FE scanning electron microscope

Experimental setups

  • two rigs for thermal post-processing of fibers (including butane burners and CO2 laser)
  • optical tweezer set-up for guiding particles in hollow-core PCF, combining a Zeiss Axiovert microscope and a Coherent cw laser (1064nm, 4W)
  • acousto-optic equipment for studying sound-light interactions (e.g. Brillouin scattering), including an 26.5 GHz RF spectrum analyser
  • set-up for fs laser drilling
  • pressure injection set-up for infiltration of PCF with metallic and semiconducting nanowires
  • dual-beam focused ion-beam etching machine

Laser systems

  • mode-locked Ti:sapphire laser Mira 900D (700-930 nm, <9 nJ, FWHM 110 fs, repetition rate 76 MHz)
  • regenerative amplifier RegA 9000 (800 nm, <6 µJ, FWHM ~120 fs, repetition rate 250 kHz)
  • optical parametrical amplifier OPA 9800 (1.2-2.4 µm, FWHM ~140 fs)
  • NOPA-Ultra: 470-700 nm, up to 270 nJ, FWHM 30 fs 
  • Fianium FemtoPower1060-10pp: 1064 nm, <5W, repetition rate < 1MHz, FWHM < 10 ps
  • passively mode-locked Erbium fiber laser (1550 nm, 120  mW, FWHM ~ 70 fs, repetition rate ~ 100 MHz) 
  • numerous Q-switched microchip and cw lasers are also available for studies of supercontinuum generation and four-wave mixing.

Spectral and temporal pulse analysis

  • range of optical spectrum analysers
  • fiber-coupled spectrometers
  • autocorrelators
  • frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG) and X-FROG systems

Computer modelling

  • SUSE workstation with four dual-core 2.2GHz AMD Opteron processors, 24GB RAM, 1x120GB and 1x400GB RAID HDD
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