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Showing posts from 2016

BOSS visits Gooch & Housego, Torquay

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Bristol Optical Students Society makes first industry visit to Gooch & Housego, Torquay. On Tuesday 29 th November, Bristol Optical Student’s Society, a.k.a BOSS, held its first ever industry excursion, bussing a mix of 11 students and post-docs down to Gooch & Housego’s Torquay site. Leading the world in high-quality optics manufacturing, the UK-based G&H has supplied the technology that underpins the foundations of our modern networked world. Having recently expanded their Torquay facility as well as being awarded the Queen’s Award for Enterprise for their highly successful Fiber-Q device, BOSS was keen to head down to the Devonshire coast to find out the secret to their success. The visit started with an overview of the historical and current state of the company, before a tour of the company’s manufacturing facilities. From the hand-fabrication of precision fused-fibre waveguides, to the assembly of bespoke optics modules, the tour visite

My experiences at the Epixfab summer school 2016

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by Giacomo Ferranti On the week between Monday 28 th of August and Friday 2 nd of September, I attended a summer school organized by Epixfab at Gent University in Belgium. The event was mainly focused on classical integrated photonics. Most of the talks on the first two days were meant to introduce the most common integrated components and to present the state of the art of their specifications. I personally found particularly useful the talk given by Dr. Laurent Vivien (Paris-Sud University, France) on integrated germanium photo-detectors. Many of the speakers talking on the following days were from companies like HP, IMEC, Luxtera or ST Microelectronics, but there were also interesting talks from academics like  Prof. Jose Capmany, from Universitat Politècnica de València in Spain. Prof. Mark Thompson who is one of the senior academics at the Centre for Quantum Photonics was a speaker too. He gave a very good talk on quantum applications of integrated photonics, whi

What it was like attending NUSOD in Australia

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By Gerardo Villarreal Garcia From 11 to 15 of July I attended the 16 th International Conference on Numerical Simulation of Optoelectronic Devices ( NUSOD ) hosted this year by the University of Sydney, in Australia. The event took place in recently inaugurated Sydney Nanoscience HUB , a multi million high-tech research and teaching facility funded by the Commonwealth Education Infrastructure Fund and the University of Sydney. Picture 1: The Sydney Nanoscience HUB The NUSOD conference is a space where theory and practice meet in order for researchers to discuss the progress in numerical simulations and practical applications in photonics and electronics.The topics discussed during the week included simulations on semiconductor lasers, LEDs, photodetectors, solar cells, integrated photonics, etc. Four days in total of talks and one final day for practical workshops on how to model optic and optoelectronic devices using software such as COMSOL Multyphysics, Cr

Physics Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting through my binoculars

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by Dr Döndü Sahin   Last year in September 2015 the Centre for Quantum Photonics ( CQP ), received an email from the European Commission (EC) inviting them to nominate a  Marie Sklodowska-Curie  fellow for a limited number of places to participate at the 66th Lindau Physics Nobel Laureate meeting. I was nominated by  Jeremy O’Brien   and  Mark Thompson as an experienced researcher under the Marie-Curie ITN in Photonic Integrated Compound Quantum Encoding ( PICQUE ) project directed by  Fabio Sciarrino  (Uni Roma). The selection process was two-fold, after my nomination by CQP 1  I submitted my supporting application to the EC and by the end of October first evaluations were positive. The EC forwarded my application to the Lindau Nobel meeting selection committee and on the 1st of March 2016, I was emailed by the Lindau committee to confirm that my application was successful. I was one of 400 applicants from over 80 different countries to attend the 66th Physics Nob