EPSRC funded project to develop next generation photonic devices

The project – part of the recently announced investment by EPSRC in functional materials – will bring together researchers from the universities of Leeds, Sheffield, York and Cambridge. The team will use Ultrafast Laser Plasma Implantation (ULPI) – a materials production technology developed at Leeds – to create the materials required for the chips. Professor Gin Jose, from the Institute for Materials Research at Leeds, said: "This is applied research; we are being funded as a manufacturing project. Many of the concepts have already been demonstrated in the lab and this backing will allow us to manufacture on a sufficient scale to prove the commercial readiness of the technology. This will allow Leeds to become the hub of this emerging technology." EPSRC is providing £2.5m to fund the collaboration under its Manufacturing of Advanced Functional Materials programme. A separate £1.2 m equipment grant from the EPSRC will pay for a ULPI manufacturing facility at Leeds. The rest of the funding will be provided by the participating universities and its 11 industrial partners. According to Prof Jose, ULPI targets a material with high powered, short pulsed lasers to generate a highly energetic plasma which is then implanted into another material. "The laser is delivering a large amount of energy to the target material. This rips apart its atomic structure and forms a visible glowing plasma that … is implanted into the material we are trying to enhance. We are pushing the materials science to the extreme and creating new materials with multiple functionalities." Professor Thomas Krauss of the University of York added: "By 2020, there will be about 50billion Internet connected devices and, to handle this, we need faster, smaller and more efficient components. Integrated photonic chips offer a way around the problem, but the technology has been held back by the difficulty of amplifying the signal in photonic circuits and integrating a laser in silicon to power them. "The current approach requires the bonding of different components and materials to form a single chip to do critical tasks like amplifying or splitting the light signal. However, this just hasn't worked. ULPI offers a way of creating such photonic circuits within a single system at industrial scale and opens the door to finally realising the immense potential of photonics."