What are some of the most important research areas in Photonics?

Research in Photonics

The photonics industry provides jobs for more than 170,000 people. The research funding provided in the last ten years has played a pivotal role in the industry’s success. The BMBF funding programme "Optical Technologies – Made in Germany" illustrates the Federal Government’s strategy to maintain and build upon Germany's strong market position in the next ten years.

A branch of high technology has long since developed around the medium of light and German businesses are among the world market leaders in various areas of photonics, including laser technology, lighting, or microscopy and imaging.

Photonics focuses on the generation, control, measurement, and – above all – the use of light in virtually every area that is vital to society and the economy. The term "photonics" refers to the photon, the light particle, just as "electronics" refers to the electron.

Light has extraordinary properties which include:

• focusability down to one millionth of a millimetre (nanometre)

• the highest achievable speed in the universe

• shortest pulses of one billionth of a billionth of a second (attosecond)

• highest output of up to billions of megawatts (petawatt)
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• Photonics puts these properties to use. Together with other key technologies it promotes progress in energy-efficient production, in sustainable lighting systems, or in the area of medical diagnostics.

The world of photonics

Competencies from areas such as mechanical engineering, laser technology, semi-conductor technology, and medicine are merging. Photonics is moving along a path similar to that of electronics – progressing from small businesses to volume production, from separate to highly integrated technologies.

Industry doing Research funding

There are many factors which have propelled photonics from being a niche technology to one of the most important sunrise industries in Germany. The innovative strength of the photonics industry and its highly qualified staff deserves mention, as do R&D investments that amount to about ten per cent of turnover – a considerable sum of 30 billion euros over the next ten years.

There is also the close cooperation between business and science which has led to the establishment of a great number of scientific facilities near these businesses. These include the four optics clusters funded under the Excellence Initiative, some of the Fraunhofer Institutes and some Max Planck institutes such as the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light founded in 2009 as well as numerous Länder institutions and measures.

On this basis, many important leaps in technology have been made in the last ten years with the help of BMBF support for R&D projects provided under the programme "Optical Technologies 

PHOTONIC APPLICABLE FOR CONSUMER APPLICATION :

The projects should develop, at TRL level 4-6, integrated photonic technologies for intra-data centre connectivity, which can be migrated into consumer application spaces, as part of digitalisation of European society.Develop photonic interconnection technologies including very small size transceivers for generic photonically enhanced information nodes in high volume, low cost domain of exascale data centres, in order to migrate into consumer application spaces as part of society wide consolidation of information resources.

Develop system embedded photonic integration solutions at chip and board level including coupling and assembly of photonic integrated circuits (PIC) and optical printed circuit boards .

 Develop disruptive solutions for agnostic, scalable, flexible networking between photonically enabled information nodes in exascale volume domains including switchless or torus architectures 

Create and lead international industrial and conformity standards and establish cross-discipline consortia to allow strong interaction with other complementary H2020 initiatives including pilot lines, in order to seamlessly migrate these technologies

PHOTONIC APPLICABLE IN TREATMENT RESEARCH ACTION:

The projects should advance therapies towards stratified medicine by enabling or further developing: -

 Therapy and diagnostics driven therapy (including, e.g., image guidance during surgical interventions, medical laser systems etc.) - 

point-of-care diagnostic tools and instruments for minimally invasive as well as noninvasive longitudinal monitoring and/or companion diagnostics The corresponding devices should be more reliable and precise than current ‘gold standard’ methods allow, without substantially increasing the examination costs or duration.

 The focus is on diseases where photonics can make a difference like cancer (with the exception of skin cancer), infectious diseases and cardiovascular diseases.Most European countries will see a strong demographic change in the near future with drastic consequences for the health and well-being of the European citizens and for their healthcare systems. 

Early detection and precise diagnostics is key to an appropriate and successful treatment. However, also treatment can be improved in several ways. On the one hand, we need gentler and stronger focused therapeutic methods. In particular, we are looking for advanced photonic methods which support surgical procedures e.g. by helping to delineate tumor borders or areas with a perfusion deficit, to guide navigation of devices, to develop new surgical tools for navigation and treatment, or to locally apply drugs. 

On the other hand, the challenge is to improve therapy by longitudinally monitoring the therapeutic progress while administering a drug and/or by working towards stratified medicine, i.e. to include and measure individual dispositions, including genetic dispositions, with regard to the effectiveness of drugs using photonics.

 Another important issue for many diseases is the aftercare phase in order to prevent a relapse. Here, it would be of advantage to detect first signs of changes in the health condition well before the symptomatic manifestation of a relapse. Detection of the health status could be facilitated by minimally or non-invasive longitudinal monitoring of biomarker panels in a decentralized manner employing photonic technologies.

PHOTONIC EMBEDDED INTEGRATED CIRCUIT :

 Major advances in the capability and performance of photonic integrated circuit technology platforms. Advanced building blocks in established integration platforms may include for example methods for phase noise reduction, modulator and polarization extinction ratio enhancement, high nonlinearity, polarization handling, non-reciprocal elements such as isolators, fast switching and high-performance single-photon sources and detectors.

 The activity accordingly encompasses forward-looking, higher-risk research up to experimental proof of concept (TRL3).Maintain technological progress consistent with expected demands of communications systems, including internet, data centres and telecom systems.Development of enhanced PIC building blocks in line with technology roadmaps, e.g. high sensitivity, high density, improved energy efficiency, higher speed.

 A generic platform approach in order to separate circuit design from production methods, thereby facilitating exploitation in the widest possible range of applications for a volume production method. Technology base established to serve new applications, e.g. LIDAR, microwave photonics, 3D imaging and display, quantum photonics, sensors and other fields Actions should include a validation of results with fabricated PIC prototypes

Photonic integration technology, when made openly available through generic foundries, can lead to a dramatic reduction of the research and development costs of advanced photonic ICs (more than an order of magnitude). Europe is in a leading position in generic integration platforms and this approach is very readily applied across a wide range of new and fast developing business areas, including telecom and data communications but also quantum photonics, medical, sensing, metrology, displays and security applications. 

The data centre networking market alone will reach $21.85 billion by 2018 with a CAGR of 11.8% (Infonetics). The bandwidth, cost and energy savings are essential to the continued development of the internet. Chip-level photonic interconnect is expected to generate $990M by 2020 (CIR) and the market for Ethernet optical interconnects is reaching $2.2 billion by 2018 (LightCounting).