Tigran Baghdasaryan Receives Best Paper Award at SPIE Photonics West 2025
Tigran Baghdasaryan, Koen Vanmol, Hugo Thienpont, Francis Berghmans, and Jürgen Van Erps from B-PHOT have been honoured with the prestigious Best Paper Award at the Advanced Fabrication Technologies for Micro/Nano Optics and Photonics XVIII conference, part of SPIE Photonics West 2025. SPIE Photonics West is the world’s largest annual photonics and optics event, bringing together thousands of researchers, industry leaders and innovators.
Sponsored by Nanoscribe and Opti-Cal GmbH, the award recognizes outstanding contributions to the field and was presented on 29 January 2025 during the conference held in San Francisco, USA.
The award-winning paper, titled "Triangular Cross-Section Multi-Mode Interference Couplers in Polymer-Enabled Photonics," presents a novel approach to designing and fabricating triangular cross-section multi-mode interference (MMI) couplers in polymer using a state-of-the-art Nanoscribe 3D-printing workstation. This achievement not only demonstrates the potential of 3D-printed photonic circuits but also paves the way for future advancements in polymer integrated optics, enabling more efficient and compact designs to be implemented with this approach.
Left: The awarded document. Right: Picture of Tigran Baghdasaryan with Georg von Freymann (Rheinland-Pfälzische Technische Univ. Kaiserslautern-Landau (Germany).
An extended version of this work has been published in Laser & Photonics Reviews. The full paper can be accessed here. In article number 2400089, Tigran Baghdasaryan and co-workers introduce an unprecedented 3D-printed splitter to tackle key interconnection challenges in the field of spatial division multiplexing. For the proof-of-concept 1 × 4 splitter, the pivotal element is a triangular cross-section 3D multimode interference coupler, complemented by S-bends and adiabatic tapers, allowing for an insertion loss of around 3 dB per channel and a remarkably short length of 180 µm.
