Food safety and quality has become increasingly important in our society. At the World of Technology and Science fair, researcher Lien Smeesters highlights the impact of photonics technologies to increase food safety while reducing food waste.

At the first ever edition of SuperNova, the VUB will showcase exciting advances in some of the most hyped technologies of the moment that lead to the world's most groundbreaking innovations. We are looking forward to welcome you at the TTO booth and VUB booth where we will take you on a photonics journey showing how smart applications of the technology of light that can be game-changing to a very broad range of domains, from 3D printing of organs to strawberry harvesting and freeform optics for car displays.

The postdoctoral researcher will be working on Carbon Nanotube Based Nonlinear Photonic Crystal Fibers within the multidisciplinary project CHARMING coordinated by B-PHOT. A unique opportunity to join our dedicated research team that achieved breakthroughs in the demonstration of PCFs for low-bending loss fibres, large mode area fibre lasers and optical fibre sensors based on fibre Bragg gratings. B-PHOT has built theoretical and experimental expertise on modelling and design of photonic crystal fibres as well as on characterisation and implementation of PCFs for various applications.

B-PHOT researcher professor Nathalie Vermeulen and her team have discovered a very unexpected and far-reaching trait of graphene, a substance that is seen by many as a game-changing material of the future. Graphene is capable of changing the wavelength of light, and their research showed that instead of strong incoming light intensities as typically employed for this purpose, graphene has a better conversion efficiency for low incoming light intensities.