ERC Inaugural lecture: “Can a rainbow help make the internet faster?”

ERC Grant Holder Martin Virte will hold an Inaugural Lecture on June 21 at the Brussels Humanities, Sciences & Engineering campus of Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Join us from 5 PM until 7 PM for his talk "Can a rainbow help make the internet faster?".

An important feature of a laser is that it emits light at a single wavelength, that is, a single colour. By tweaking the concept, we can fabricate lasers that can simultaneously emit light at different wavelengths – different colours creating our rainbow– though keeping all other key laser features. But, although they are often seen as fancy lightbulbs that can be easily turned on or off, lasers are complex dynamical devices, and the multi-colour emission goes against their natural behaviour. In fact, each colour “competes” with the others to become the dominant one.

In the COLOR’UP project, our goal is to harness this competition taking place inside the laser to process optical signals. In other words, we want to let the laser do all the work manipulating the incoming light signal without the need for an active control. To do so, we will rely on customization of the laser structure and on a finer understanding of the nonlinearities of the multi-colour lasing process.

And how would that make the internet faster? Well, if successful the main advantage would be that, compared to current electronic systems, this approach would – in principle – be easier to scale up towards ultra-high frequencies from hundreds of GHz to the THz range, towards 6G and beyond.