About the project
Semiconductor 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 semiconductor nonlinear photonics as the materials display a number of important nonlinear effects that can be used to generate and process signals at ultrafast speeds.
This research project will follow the development of semiconductor 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 semiconductor 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.
The work will have elements of
- waveguide design
- component fabrication and optimization
- optical characterization and device benchmarking using both experimental and numerical tools
There will be opportunities to interact with our National and International collaborators.
The Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) PhD comprises a solid education for a research career. The structured first year involves attending our training programme running in parallel with carrying out your research project. This provides a smooth transition from your degree course towards the more open-ended research that takes place in the following years under the guidance of your project supervisors. We expect the vast majority of our students to present their work at international conferences and to write papers in leading academic journals as their research progresses. Students will emerge from the PhD with skills at the forefront of future photonics research and will benefit from the many opportunities to interact with the wider community of PhD students across the Southampton Campus through academic, sporting and cultural events.
The 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.
