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Diamond for laser engineering: lasers for manufacturing and sensing

Diamond is an exciting and enabling material of laser engineering. This project will aim to exploit diamond directly as a laser gain material so as to fully exploit its excellent thermal and mechanical properties.

Number of places

1

Opens

4 December 2017

Duration

4 years

Eligibility

Qualifications:

BSc (Hons) 2:1 or equivalent degree in Physics, Engineering or a related discipline.

Funding:

Scholarships (fees and stipend) available on a competitive basis for UK/EU students, please contact supervisor for details.

Project Details

Lasers are a key enabling technology, powering progress from manufacturing to quantum technologies. The common thread in engineering systems tailored to these applications is to requirement to make high performance lasers smaller and more robust. Exploiting novel materials – such as high optical quality synthetic diamond – provides a route to achieving these goals.

Project

The studentship will have two parallel themes:

  1. High power Raman lasers for manufacturing and remote sensing. This theme will develop novel diamond Raman laser architectures that aim to shift the output of fibre lasers into spatial, spectral and temporal regimes where they are better suited to applications such as LIDAR and welding of transparent plastics. This work will be done in collaboration with the world-leading fibre lasers team at Southampton (Prof Johan Nilsson and colleagues) with the explicit aim of moving towards follow-on funding in the technology transfer space working with current industrial collaborators Thales and SPI Lasers. 
  2. Non-linear photonics of diamond colour centres. This theme will explore the laser spectroscopy, temporal and spectral dynamics of gain/induced absorption, and charge transfer mechanisms, of colour centres in diamond with relatively high concentrations (100s ppb) under high intensity laser illumination. These are the conditions required for possible laser operation, but are also potentially relevant for sensing applications.

Institute of Photonics

The Institute of Photonics (IoP), established in 1996, is a commercially-oriented research unit at the University of Strathclyde, the Times Higher Education UK University of the Year 2012/13 and UK Entrepreneurial University of the Year 2013/14. The Institute’s key objective is to bridge the gap between academic research and industrial applications and development in the area of photonics. The offices and laboratories of the IoP are based in Strathclyde’s Glasgow city centre campus. We are part of the Strathclyde Technology and Innovation Centre (TIC) initiative and co-located with the new Fraunhofer Centre for Applied Photonics. Researchers at the IoP are active in a broad range of photonics fields under the areas of Photonic Devices, Advanced Lasers and Neurophotonics.

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