Explore our current postgraduate research degree and PhD opportunities.
If you’re interested in ultrafast lasers/nonlinear optics or ultrahigh precision measurements, consider a PhD in the area of comb technology using a state-of-the-art comb laser system. Using recent developments in laser and frequency conversion it has become possible to produce laser sources providing a comb of spectral lines with spectral frequencies accurate to parts in a thousand, million, million. Such combs have revolutionised the accuracy with which time, frequency and distance can be measured and are opening a host of new device and application opportunities.
Here in the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC), at the University of Southampton, radically different, new generation optical fibres are being designed and manufactured. The unique properties of these hollow core optical fibres mean they surpass the traditional glass core fibres used today in virtually every aspect. However, their performance can be further improved or tailored to a specific application via their design. The core of the project lies in research work with such tailored hollow core fibres.
Our aim is to develop the next generation of integrated photonics materials that will offer low optical losses over various wavelength windows spanning from the ultraviolet (UV ~400nm) to the visible (VIS~900nm) regime. These materials will enable the realisation of photonic integrated circuits that will underpin emerging industrial applications in quantum photonics, metrology, spectroscopy, sensing, healthcare, and display technologies.
This project is tackling major technological roadblocks associated with silicon photonics and aims to demonstrate the monolithic integration of III/V lasers with CMOS photonic waveguiding components. This breakthrough will enable the development of innovative photonic circuits to serve the requirements of a wide range of low cost optical interconnects and sensing technologies.
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 remain by far the largest market for photonics and as such it represents one of the ORC’s primary research areas.
Fibre lasers have seen a rapid development in output power and performance over the past three decades and have revolutionised the application space for photonics. However the development of fibre lasers with wavelength-flexible single-frequency sources is lagging other areas of fibre lasers research.
Generation of femtosecond and attosecond X-ray pulses using intense laser pulses has transformed ultrafast science. The ability to produce coherent ultrafast X-ray pulses has applications in many areas, from the investigation of ultrafast molecular dynamics to biomedical imaging.
Hollow-core optical fibres guide light in a central hole inside a silica microstructure. These newly developed fibres exceed traditional solid fibres used in the past 40 years in every metric: lower attenuation, nonlinearity, latency, and better high-power laser transmission. However, the central hole where light is transmitted is typically filled with air and for several applications even air limits the fibre performance.
We are looking for a PhD student to work on the design and numerical simulation of the next generation of high-power fibre lasers. This project is part of a major new initiative funded by the UK Research Council at the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC), University of Southampton.
You will investigate a route to high-power visible sources through cladding pumping of RE-doped silica fibres using GaN-LDs. You will be involved in the fabrication of RE (such as Pr3+, Dy3+ and Tb3+) - doped fibres in modified silica glass hosts offering low phonon energy while maintaining the other characteristics of silica fibres. Additionally, you will perform a detailed spectroscopic characterisation of the fabricated fibres and will be involved in the development of visible fibres. You will have access to the the state-of-the-art fibre fabrication facilities and laboratories at the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) in the Zepler Institute.