About the project
The main goal of the project is to design metamaterial structures for efficient sensing systems. Silicon Photonics can offer small and low cost sensors for environmental monitoring (e.g. green house gases), industrial process control, agriculture or healthcare. Metamaterial structures can be used for the realisation of low loss waveguides with large evanescent field, efficient optical fibre–to–silicon chip coupling or for the integration of detectors on silicon chips.
The mid-IR is a new frontier for integrated photonics that requires the use of new waveguide materials and geometries, and new solutions will therefore be needed for mid-IR silicon photonics sensors. The project would involve collaboration with Dr Robert Halir from the University of Malaga in Spain and Professor Pavel Cheben from the National Research Council of Canada, who have been leading developers of metamaterial engineered photonic devices, which will be applied in this project. The project would involve the design, fabrication, and testing of waveguide, couplers and detectors and their integration into sensing systems, making use of the Optoelectronics Research Centre’s world leading cleanroom fabrication and photonic device characterisation facilities. The successful applicant would spend extensive time at the collaborating institutions (University of Malaga and NRC Canada).
We are looking for an enthusiastic candidate with a background in electronics, physics or photonics. The applicant would join a cutting-edge research group in the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) at the University of Southampton, and work in the state-of-the-art cleanroom facilities and photonic device characterisation laboratories at the ORC. They would work in cooperation with postdoctoral researchers employed on the £5.8 million project “MISSION” (Mid- Infrared Silicon Photonic Sensors for Healthcare and Environmental Monitoring), and with six academic and six industrial collaborators.
You can find out more about the supervisors for this project at their personal pages below:
Goran: https://zepler.soton.ac.uk/people/gm1a11
Milos: https://zepler.soton.ac.uk/people/mn3m11
Robert: https://www.photonics-rf.uma.es/index.php/people?id=125
