WhiteLase-2020 addresses the need in semiconductor manufacturing and medical markets for a high-end, industrially-robust, high-brightness illumination source having the spectrum of a lamp and the beam quality and reliability of a laser. Such a source will disrupt the €600m global market for industrial lighting and be a key enabler for the combined €7.5 billion Ophthalmic and Semiconductor Equipment markets which depend on them. Within the WhiteLase-2020 project, Fianium will overcome the challenges of engineering a newly developed (2014) scientific technology demonstrator into a compact, robust, industrially qualified illumination source capable of volume manufacture with 10X reduction in unit price. The resulting project outputs will be a truly disruptive light source qualified to customer-provided specifications and will enable Fianium to quickly develop a commercial product, establish manufacturing capability to customer-forecast annual volumes of 2000-units and achieve revenues in excess of €20M, from 2018. WhiteLase-2020 illumination sources will be more than 1.25 Million times brighter than high power Xenon lamps and will be capable of replacing more than 16 individual high power laser diodes. Furthermore, the technology will be qualified to lifetimes in excess of 20,000 hours and will be designed for manufacture in volume with unit price below €10,000 (10X reduction). The project outcomes will present end users with enormous performance and cost benefits over existing state-of-art. The light sources will totally disrupt existing markets within 2 years of the project, replacing high power lamps, LED's and multi-colour laser diode modules. Furthermore, new markets will be generated over the following decade through the availability of this unique illumination technology.

This fellowship will allow me to lead the exploitation of optical fibre technology in the healthcare industry. My work will use relatively cheap starting materials for optical fibres developed for the telecommunications industry and apply them to applications within healthcare. This will allow me to produce low-cost endoscopic devices capable of diagnosing and treating a number of conditions. I will work closely with clinical professionals and the healthcare industry throughout projects to define and tackle challenges with a genuine clinical pull. The project which will be undertaken is to produce an endoscopic device which will significantly change the care pathway for a patient which has a potentially cancerous lung nodule. Current care is to monitor the nodule with scans (perhaps over a number of years) and look for changes which indicate it is cancerous. This leads to continued radiation exposure from the scans and anxiety as the patient will be living their life knowing they possibly have lung cancer. My device will be able to go into the lungs and accurately diagnose the nodule and then ablate it destroying it instantly completely transforming the patient experience.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

The aim of this proposal is to demonstrate for the first time a semiconductor laser emitting transform-limited optical pulses of less than 200 fs duration in a diffraction-limited beam. This achievement will open the way for the development of truly compact ultrafast optical systems. Our device is a surface-emitting laser, optically pumped using the cheap and rugged technology developed for diode-pumped solid state lasers, with perfect beam quality enforced by an extended cavity. It emits a periodic train of ultrashort pulses at a repetition rate of a few GHz using the optical Stark effect passive mode-locking technique introduced by the Southampton group. Recent proof-of-principle experiments have shown that these lasers can generate stable 260-fs pulse trains. We have shown, moreover, by modelling and by experiment, that the optical Stark mechanism can shorten pulses down to durations around 70 fs, comparable with the quantum well carrier-carrier scattering time. Our proposal is to build on these world-leading results with a systematic exploration of the physics of lasers operating in this regime. The key is to grow quantum well gain and saturable absorber mirror structures in which dispersion, filtering and the placing of the quantum wells under the laser mode are controlled to tight tolerances. We shall achieve this using molecular beam epitaxy to realise structure designs that are developed with the aid of rigorous numerical modelling of the optical Stark pulse-forming mechanism. We shall also use femtosecond pump and probe spectroscopy to determine the dynamical behaviour of our structures in this regime directly. For these pioneering studies, the compressively-strained InGaAs/GaAs quantum well system operating around 1 micron is most suitable; and this is where we shall work; however, the devices that we develop can in principle in future be realised in other material systems in different wavelength regions. We shall also make a first study of incorporating quantum dot gain and absorber material into optical Stark mode-locked lasers, aiming to exploit the intrinsically fast carrier dynamics of these structures. In summary, this proposal aims to shrink femtosecond technology from shoebox-size to credit-card size, and in the process explore a regime of ultrafast semiconductor dynamics that has never before now been exploited to produce light pulses.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.