News

The Open-Innovation Photonics pilot for North West Europe (OIP4NWE) aims to drastically reduce high R&D costs and time for SMEs in the field of photonics. A significant decrease of the defect rate in pilot production and a shorter throughput time can help establish a thousand integrated firms within a decade.

The global market in photonics is poised to grow to 615 billion EUR by 2020. Europe is the world second-biggest supplier of photonic products after China, creating 1 million new jobs by 2030 according to the new vision paper “Europe’s age of light ” published by Photonics21.

More than 200 persons from industry, universities and research centres celebrated the 10^thanniversary of Belgian Industrial Research & Development (BiR&D) in the Palace of Academy on March 20^th , 2018, in presence of His Majesty the King, Minister Muyters and Minister Marcourt.

IOP Publishing has launched three high-impact open access journals.The scope of these journals will focus on research covering three aspects of the physical world that will shape the future of our planet: energy, materials and light.

Optical fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors have been the subject of extensive and relentless research efforts over the past 40 years. This technology is now applied in diverse fields such as in bio and medical, and in structural health monitoring of civil and aeronautic engineering structures, FBG sensing based research and innovation is one of B-PHOT's cornerstone activities.

After a most inspiring PhD research and defense of her PhD thesis ‘Advances in freeform optical design methods for imaging applications’, Yunfeng has graduated as Doctor in Engineering. Including freeform components in optical systems provides numerous potentials for enhanced performance as well as compact and lightweight packaging with opportunities for mass production at low cost.

STEM project Quantum SpinOff introduces modern physics to 6th years students in Science Mathematics. Today students from Sint Jozef Aarschot visited VUB B-PHOT research group to learn how photonics can be applied in innovative projects.

During the continuous quest for maximizing the protection of data, substantial research has been performed in the domain of lasers and optical chaos. Recently B-PHOT researchers demonstrated that using mechanical strain, polarization chaos could be triggered in commercial VCSELs. Their article with results on “Strain induced polarization chaos in a solitary VCSEL” was published in Scientific Reports.

Support of innovative research activities are key in view of ensuring the safety of future particle accelerator driven nuclear systems.

A team of enthusiastic PhD researchers takes the students for an interactive journey into the world of light technology. In half a day, multiple demonstrations bring them from the origin of light and photons to lasers, from the manipulation of light to optical fibers for data communication or for medical imaging applications such as endoscopy.

The Research Foundation in Flanders (FWO Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek) has awarded Dr. Martin Virte’s research grant “ReFlex – Reconfigurable node for flexible secure networks”.