The Fellowship, entitled “Mid-IR ultrabroadbaNd thulium-doped Fibre Laser sYstems” (MINDFLY) has successfully reached its ultimate goal of training a talented researcher, Dr. Maria Chernusheva, through a research project in the fast-growing field of science, technology and industrial applications of fibre lasers, material science and nonlinear optics. The success of the multidisciplinary project has led to a number of disruptive innovations in photonics. Particularly, the project has led to discovering of new regimes of ultrafast fibre laser generation at 1550 and 1900 nm wavelength range, developing of new numerical codes for ultrashort pulse formation and propagation, thorough investigation of carbon nanotubes (CNT) properties as saturable absorber, as well as new designing of novel rotation sensing ultrafast laser gyroscopes.
The overall objectives of the project are: (i) Broadening of the Fellow’s expertise; (ii) Development of novel theoretical models for MLFLs and ultrabroadband SC generation; (iii) Design an advanced technique for high-stable laser mode-locking; (iv) Development of the nonlinear science techniques for the SC generation applying novel types of optical fibres; and (v) Applications of the laser systems for optical frequency metrology, sensing, and optical communications.
The development of Mid-IR fibre lasers and sensors contributes to the EU economy by itself, as a largely growing industrial sector, which market is anticipated to increase tenfold in 5 years and reach $7 billion by 2019. The demonstrated through the project ultrafast fibre laser systems overtake earlier reported state-of-the-art results, hence increasing the EU Research Area competitiveness in the world. Being applied in medicine, the burst-mode operating ultrashot pulse fibre laser has high potential to be applied for high-precision soft and fragile tissue ablation, which does not induce collateral damage and heat accumulation, therefore, significantly enhancing medical capabilities. The accurate measurements of velocities and relative motion, also used for GPS, require high precision and compact gyroscopes. The demonstrated elegant configuration of ultrafast fibre laser gyroscope has a performance, which can be tailored to one of large ring gyroscopes, therefore can be applied in seismological measurements or for detection of Earth axis wobble.
