The photonics industry is booming throughout the world, lasers in particular have played a central role in several technological developments for many decades, from communications to medicine, with an expected market value of €15 billion by 2022 , and is also increasingly important for the European economy. As photonic devices shrink in both physical size and power consumption, integrated photonic devices will increasingly penetrate into consumer products such as smartphones and photonic sensors, for various applications from motion detection to navigation of autonomous vehicles.
The European Industrial doctorate programme CORAL will train two young researchers in photonics technology and in particular in laser science, addressing the increasing need for an educated workforce in photonics in Europe.
CORAL establishes a training programme between two world-class institutions, IBM and Imperial College London (ICL), providing an appropriate balance of applied industrial research as well as in-depth understanding of the underlying physics. The bilateral nature of CORAL enables a close interaction of both partners, with exchange of know-how and shared facilities, aimed at exploiting fully the synergies among the two institutions.
CORAL aims to go beyond conventional integrated photonics to explore the novel field of Random Lasing and in particular Network Lasing . This is a relatively new discipline based on lasing from disordered systems, as for example the collective coupling of multiple nanolasers via nanoscale waveguides and the non-linear control of such coupled systems. This has potential applications in areas such as neuromorphic and quantum computing as well as hardware security, which are all areas of strategic interest. For the ESRs, training in these highly sought disciplines will further complement the solid foundation in integrated photonics that will be gained in CORAL.
