Description du projet
Un laser femtoseconde innovant
Les lasers femtoseconde ont permis la mesure directe des fréquences optiques et la réalisation d’horloges optiques. Les lasers femtoseconde présentent un fort potentiel pour un large éventail d’applications. Toutefois, la taille et le coût élevé de cette technologie en limitent les applications. Le projet FEMTOCHIP, financé par l’UE, produira un laser modulé à l’échelle de la puce entièrement intégré, dont l’énergie de pulsation, la puissance de crête et la gigue correspondent aux spécifications d’un système laser à fibre de la taille d’une boîte à chaussures. Cette innovation permettra de réaliser une partie considérable des applications du laser femtoseconde. Le projet abordera les principaux défis afin de faciliter une puissance de crête et une surpuissance d’impulsion élevées tout en supprimant les instabilités de commutation-Q. Il permettra la production de pulsations courtes par compensation de la dispersion sur la puce et absorption saturable artificielle.
Objectif
Over the last 20 years, femtosecond lasers have led to a host of novel scientific and industrial instrumentation enabling the direct measurement of optical frequencies and the realization of optical clocks, a Nobel Prize winning technology. Initially developed for fundamental science, the potential of femtosecond lasers for a wide range of cross-disciplinary applications has been demonstrated, including e.g. those in optical telecommunication, photonic analog-to-digital conversion, ultra-high precision signal sources for the upcoming quantum technologies and broadband optical spectroscopy in the environmental or bio-medical sciences and many more.
Although, impressive cross-disciplinary demonstrations of the potential of femtosecond lasers are numerous, the technology has been hampered by its large size and high cost per system. The existing mode-locked semiconductor diode laser technology does not fulfil the needed performance specifications. The aim of the FEMTOCHIP project is to deliver a fully integrated chip-scale mode-locked laser with pulse energy, peak power and jitter specifications of a shoebox sized fiber laser system enabling a large fraction of the above-mentioned applications. Key challenges addressed are large cross-section, high gain, low background loss waveguide amplifiers, low loss passive waveguide technology and chirped waveguide gratings to accommodate high pulse peak power, to suppress Q-switching instabilities and to implement short pulse production by on-chip dispersion compensation and artificial saturable absorption.
Therefore, the FEMTOCHIP consortium is composed of leaders in CMOS compatible ultra-low loss integrated SiN-photonics, rare-earth gain media development and deposition technology as well as ultrafast laser physics and technology for design, simulation and characterization to identify and address the key challenges in demonstrating a highly stable integrated femtosecond laser with table-top performance.
Champ scientifique
- engineering and technologymaterials engineeringfibers
- natural sciencesphysical sciencesopticslaser physicsultrafast lasers
- natural sciencesphysical scienceselectromagnetism and electronicssemiconductivity
- natural sciencesphysical sciencesquantum physicsquantum optics
- natural sciencesphysical sciencesopticsspectroscopy
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RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinateur
22607 Hamburg
Allemagne