The Specialty Optical Fibers Technologies(SOFT) LabThe specialty optical fibers technologies laboratory primarily concerns with development of high performance optical fibers and new glasses for photonics applications.
Glass fibers doped with various rare-earth ions and transition metal ions are being developed for photonic devices such as optical amplifier with wide bandwidth, wavelength converter, fiber gratings, fiber isolator, all-optical fiber switch, and so on.
New manufacturing processes are being developed for fibers with nonlinear optical functions particularly, fibers doped with semiconductor quantum dots and nano-sized metal particles. Planar optical devices are also studied using flame hydrolysis deposition process. The laboratory is equipped with a MCVD system for glass preform manufacturing, a fiber draw tower, and measurement systems for optical properties such as OSA, PL, OPO, TRSS, FTIR Microscopy. There are three research groups which are related to the works on high performance optical fibers for gratings and lasers, doped fibers and PLCs with high nonlinear optical properties, and glass and optical fiber processings and characterization.High Performance Optical Fibers for Gratings and Lasers
The increases in UV sensitivity and in thermal stability are the important requirements for the grating application, so fibers with new glass compositions and dopants are developed and their characteristics and the processing parameters are studied. Fiber lasers for optical communications and medical applications are being developed.
Doped Fibers and PLCs with Nonlinear Optical Properties