About
Prof. Francesco Poletti leads two main areas of research at the ORC. He is head of the Hollow Core Fibre group, an interdisciplinary team devoted to the modelling and fabrication of ground-breaking optical fibres that guide light in air, and of the Compound Glass and Fibre Group, that is devoted to the development of non-silica based optical fibres and devices.
He is a well-known figure in in the international optical fibre community for his work on nonlinear optics, special optical fibres, and in particular hollow core optical fibres, a topic on which he has presented over 25 invited, tutorial and key-note speeches at major international conferences. Over the years, he has contributed to (and chaired) several technical program committees at conferences, including OFC, ECOC, SOF, WSOF and OECC.
Prof Poletti has co-authored over 400 publications in international journals and conferences (more than 200 related to aspects of hollow core fibre technology) and produced over 10 granted patents.
For his research on hollow core fibres (HCF), in 2009 he was awarded Fellowships from the Royal Academy of Engineering and from the Royal Society. He has been a Royal Society University Research Fellow from 2009 to 2017, and he currently holds an ERC consolidator grant (Lightpipe, 2017-2021).
Overall, he has been Principal Investigator on over 15 grants from Industry, UK Research Councils and EU, totalling over £10M in direct funding. Besides, he was one of the originators and a workpackage leader in a very successful EU FP7 project MODEGAP (2008-2012) in the field of space division multiplexing. He is also currently Co-Investigator in two large EPSRC programmes: the EPSRC Programme Grant Airguide Photonics and the EPSRC Photonics Manufacturing Hub.
He is the co-founder of Lumenisity Ltd, a startup company developing HCF based cable technology for optical data communications.
Research
Research groups
Current research
Professor Poletti’s interests include nonlinear optical effects in fibres, photonic bandgaps, light resonances as optical guidance mechanisms, direct and inverse fibre design, fluid dynamics models of fibre fabrication, loss mechanisms and intermodal effects in optical fibres and optical communications, as well as the development of novel nonlinear, polarisation maintaining and active optical fibres.
Over the years, Prof Poletti had his group have led many world-record-setting experiments based on HCFs, which he has personally presented at 8 post-deadline sessions at the premier optical communications conferences, ECOC and OFC. These include the first demonstration of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) transmission in an HCF [1], the highest data transmission capacity in an HCF (70Tbit/s) [2] and the longest single span transmission (11km) [3].
More recently, he has proposed a novel HCF fibre concept, the Nested Antiresonant Nodeless Fibre (NANF) [4], based on which in 2020 his Southampton group has achieved the lowest reported optical loss in any HCF (0.28 dB/km) [5], and the longest data transmission distance through a hollow-core fibre, in collaboration with colleagues at Politecnico di Torino (772km) [6].
NANFs have proved capable of maintaining the polarisation purity of in incoming beam with a fidelity orders of magnitude higher than the best solid core polarization maintaining fibre [7], and their loss at technologically relevant wavelengths in the visible, around 850nm and 1060nm is already comparable or slightly lower than solid core silica fibre can possibly achieve [8].
[1] F. Poletti, et al. Nature Photonics 7, 279 (2013);
[2] V. A. Sleiffer, et al. J. Lightwave Technol. 32, 854-863 (2013);
[3] Y. Chen, et al., J. Lightwave Technol. 34, 104-113 (2016);
[4] F. Poletti, Optics express 22, 23807-23828 (2014);
[5] D. Bradley, …, and F. Poletti, OFC, Postdeadline Th4B.4, (2020);
[6] A. Nespola et al. OFC, Postdeadline Th4B.5, (2020);
[7] A. Taranta, …, and F. Poletti, Nature Photonics, v. 14, 504–510 (2020);
[8] H. Sakr, …, and F. Poletti, Nature Communications, 11, Article number: 6030 (2020);