ERC Starting Grant for VUB B-PHOT Researcher Pablo Marin-Palomo

The new VUB B-PHOT project COMBYNE will explore how networks of interacting semiconductor lasers can generate and manipulate many colours of light together on a single photonic platform. The research could lead to compact and energy-efficient photonic engines for future optical and terahertz communication systems.

Prof. Dr. Pablo Marin-Palomo, researcher at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and B-PHOT Brussels Photonics, has been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant for COMBYNE. Over the next five years, he will leverage the interaction between multiple lasers on a single chip to generate a flexible frequency comb on a monolithic platform. The ambition is to establish a new class of compact photonic engines for future optical and terahertz communication systems.

At the heart of COMBYNE is the optical frequency comb. While lasers typically produce only one colour of light, an optical frequency comb source generates dozens or even hundreds of evenly spaced colours. Frequency combs have applications in metrology, spectroscopy and optical and terahertz communications. In a communication system, each colour can carry a separate stream of data, allowing one compact light source to support many parallel channels. This could help communication systems accommodate rapidly growing data traffic while limiting their energy consumption.

While these applications would benefit from compact, reconfigurable frequency comb sources that can be manufactured at scale, current sources are still mostly based on multi-platform integration, since monolithic frequency comb sources can face limitations in bandwidth and coherence. In addition, frequency combs face a long-standing trade-off between bandwidth and flexibility: broadband frequency combs are challenging to tune, while reconfigurable frequency combs are limited in bandwidth.

With COMBYNE, Marin-Palomo will realise a programmable optical frequency comb source on a monolithic platform by harnessing the nonlinear dynamics of mutually coupled semiconductor lasers

The project will study networks of coupled semiconductor lasers and investigate how their collective dynamics can be used to engineer a reconfigurable optical frequency comb. COMBYNE will connect fundamental laser physics, photonic-chip design and high-speed communication experiments. The team will first identify and understand useful dynamical regimes, then translate those findings into integrated photonic devices. The most promising concepts will subsequently be tested using high-speed data signals.

The ERC Starting Grant will enable Marin-Palomo to establish a dedicated COMBYNE team at VUB B-PHOT and to develop the models, integrated photonic devices and experiments required for the project.