Current research degree projects
Explore our current postgraduate research degree and PhD opportunities.
Explore our current postgraduate research degree and PhD opportunities.
This is an unparallel opportunity to redefine the landscape of distributed sensing systems and contribute to groundbreaking developments in healthcare, environment monitoring, and beyond.
Over the course of the project, the successful candidate will focus on development and characterisation of highly customized materials and feedstocks, which shall be then evaluated in laser-based fibre fabrication.
Embark on a ground-breaking Ph.D. journey poised to revolutionize the field of large aerial drone condition monitoring.
This PhD is at the cutting edge of optical fibre technology, pioneer unconventional methods for laser-based glass 3D printing, focusing on tailored materials for highly customized optical devices—a potential industry game-changer.
Multimode optical fibres have recently emerged as a promising breakthrough technology to boost the data transmission speed of the Internet network to unprecedented levels. In these fibres each spatial mode carries an independent data channel, and the interaction (cross-talk) among different modes is a problem to avoid.
At the Optoelectronics Research Centre, we are leading the world in developing a new generation of optical fibres that promise a revolution in applications ranging from optical communications to ultraprecise optical sensors. Our hollow-core optical fibres harness some truly intriguing physics to guide light in an air-filled core region over tens of kilometres distance and are now rivalling and outperforming standard optical fibres. However, their transformative potential in many areas remain largely unexplored.
The optical fibre communications industry has been facing some significant challenges in recent years. As transmission rates in optical networks constantly increase, and with the concerns over the energy consumption of communication networks becoming ever more relevant, there is a compelling argument for adopting new techniques for the implementation of signal processing of communication signals. On the other hand, the rise in demand for internet traffic is such that necessitates the adoption of new transmission techniques in order to ensure that the available bandwidth is sufficient.
This is an opportunity to carry out a PhD at the Communications Systems Lab of the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC). The group has been at the forefront of optical fibre communications since the very earliest days of the field providing several critical contributions, including the invention of the erbium doped fibre amplifier – a device that eliminated fibre loss as the fundamental limiting factor to signal transmission and which is installed in all modern optical communication networks. Optical communications remains by far the largest market for photonics and as such it represents one of the ORC’s primary research areas.
Silicon materials are synonymous with the microelectronics industry and the processors in everyday gadgets such as mobile phones, tablets, digital radios and televisions. More recently, due to its favourable optical properties, silicon has gained popularity as an optical information technology, i.e., using photons instead of electrons to transfer information. Bringing these two research areas together on an integrated platform will have huge technological consequences. However, there is a challenge: silicon photonic devices are typically fabricated via complex processing of expensive single crystal wafers, which renders multi-device integration difficult. This project seeks to develop a simple, low-cost laser materials processing procedure to fabricate high-quality polysilicon photonic platforms that will ease issues associated with optoelectronic integration.
In the last decade, nanophotonics has emerged as one of the most important research fields in optics. A tiny nano-object plays the role of a nanoantenna: when excited by a light source, it scatters light in the surrounding environment in one or more directions that depend on its geometry and material. An important issue that has not been fully understood yet is how to control the directionality and power of this scattered radiation.