Nonlinear wavelength conversion of fibre lasers to the visible and mid-infrared

Sep29Wed

Nonlinear wavelength conversion of fibre lasers to the visible and mid-infrared

Wed, 29/09/2021 - 15:00 to 16:00

Location:

Speaker: 
Dr Timothy Runcorn
Affiliation: 
Imperial College London
Synopsis: 

Fibre lasers are an excellent platform for developing compact, robust laser sources for a wide variety of applications. Many of these applications, however, require light outside of the standard emission wavelengths of fibre lasers. In this talk, I will describe our recent work using nonlinear effects in both optical fibres and crystals to shift the wavelength of fibre lasers to spectral regions not well served by existing laser technology. This includes high-power nanosecond lasers across the green to far-red part of the visible spectrum for biomedical imaging applications such as super-resolution microscopy, a picosecond source around 2.9 μm for tissue ablation and a nanosecond source around 4.4 μm using the new nonlinear crystal cadmium silicon phosphide (CSP).

Biography: 

Dr Tim Runcorn is a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow in the Photonics Group in the Department of Physics at Imperial College London. He received MSci in Physics, MRes in Photonics and PhD degrees from Imperial in 2011, 2012 and 2016, respectively. Between 2016–2018 he was a Research Associate in the Femtosecond Optics Group at Imperial, funded by EPSRC Pathways to Impact and Doctoral Prize Fellowship awards to develop visible fibre lasers for super-resolution microscopy. In 2018, he spent a year in industry on secondment to NKT Photonics in Southampton developing ultrafast lasers for multiphoton microscopy before returning to Imperial to work on commercialisation activities. In 2020, he was awarded a five-year Research Fellowship by the Royal Academy of Engineering to develop new fibre laser technology for advanced biomedical imaging applications.

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