Nanophotonics on the agenda at Sydney science forum
Applications up for discussion by CUDOS researchers include point-of-care medical diagnostics, energy-efficient datacomms and environmental sensing.
Ben Eggleton and Andrea Blanco Redondo from CUDOS "“ the ARC Centre for Ultrahigh bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems, a research consortium between six Australian Universities including the University of Sydney "“ will share their insight on nanophotonics at next week's Sydney Science Forum (26 April 2017). As the team highlights, harnessing the behaviour of light at the nanoscale can help address some of the major challenges of our time, such as producing cheap and reliable point-of-care medical diagnostic devices and reducing the carbon footprint of big data. Tiny optical chips that control light at the nanoscale could also open the door to miniature sensors for measuring air quality and detecting pollution.
Earlier this month, scientists at the centre made a breakthrough achieving radio frequency signal control at sub-nanosecond time scales on a chip-scale optical device. And in March, CUDOS researchers at RMIT University, partnering with Luceda Photonics, launched a comprehensive toolset of electromagnetic simulators for photonic devices, called REME.
According to the collaboration, REME enables users to harness a number of new effects on silicon photonic devices that cannot be simulated with existing tools. These effects are important for high speed photonic links in data centres, but could also form the basis of ultra-high speed USB cables.
