The bright blue colour of the Cyanophrys remus butterfly has its origin in the unique periodic nanostructures in its wings, which are called ‘photonic crystals’. For more than two decades, engineers in Photonics technology are trying to understand the operation of such photonic crystals.

Today students and researchers from VUB B-PHOT Photonics Research at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, are presenting the Science Show Photonics at the first “International Day of Light” (#IDL18) at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) headquarters in Paris.

VUB B-PHOT researcher Lien Smeesters is one of the five promising researchers selected for for the yearly EOS Pipet prize.

In the domain of Illumination Optics and Optical design controlling the propagation of light is key. Game-changing features are compact size, highly efficient light collection at low production costs.

Today physicians are still severely hampered by the lack of precision of the needle tip location during a biopsy. Looking at lung cancers, 25% of the diagnoses suffer a false negative outcome through traditional biopsy methods.

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.