20 - 24 October, 2024
Grand Prince Hotel Osaka Bay
Osaka, Japan
Short Courses
Short courses cover a broad range of topic areas at a variety of educational levels (introductory to advanced) and are taught by highly-regarded industry experts.
They are an excellent opportunity to learn about new products, cutting-edge technology and vital information at the forefront of your field. They are designed to increase your knowledge of a specific subject while offering you the experience of knowledgeable teachers.
Certificates of Attendance are available for those who register and attend a course. To request a Certificate of Attendance after the course concludes, please email cstech@optica.org with your name, course name, conference name and year.
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SC522 - Understanding Pulse Generation with Lasers
Sunday, 08 October
Instructor: Rüdiger Paschotta, RP Photonics Consulting GmbH, Switzerland
Short Course Description:
The goal of this course is to achieve a solid understanding of pulse generation with Q switching and mode locking of solid-state lasers (bulk lasers as well as fiber lasers). The operation principles of lasers based on those methods are carefully explained, and various qualitative and quantitative design guidelines are given. Particularly for mode-locked lasers, it will be shown that such lasers can be operated in quite different parameters regimes and may be based on substantially different principles of pulse formation. Various factors limiting the performance of pulsed lasers are discussed.
Download the Short Course Notes
Short Course Benefits:
After attending this course, the participants should be able to:
- describe the operation principles of various types of pulsed lasers
- analyze some key operation parameters and explain their role for the proper functioning of a laser
- explain limitations of performance figures, e.g., of peak power in a mode-locked fiber laser
- explain various types of instabilities which can occur in mode-locked lasers
- assess which type of mode-locked laser may be suitable for a given operation regime
The course is particularly useful for people developing pulsed lasers, be it in an industrial context or in scientific research, and already have some solid background in laser physics, e.g., understanding laser gain and gain saturation. However, it should also be a useful introduction for people who are relatively new in this area and need to get an overview on what aspects should be taken into account when developing lasers. Even those who only apply existing lasers may benefit from a better understanding of pulsed lasers, although some parts of the course may be too detailed for them.
Instructor Biography:
Rüdiger Paschotta is the founder and managing director of RP Photonics and is well known for his open-access RP Photonics Encyclopedia. His main offers are design and simulation software in photonics and powerful digital marketing in photonics (using the buyer's guide connected with the encyclopedia). Besides, he offers technical consultancy and tailored staff training courses.
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SC523 - Hollow-Core Fibers: Fabrication and Applications
Sunday, 08 October
Instructor: Rodrigo Amezcua Correa and Selim Habib
Short Course Description:
Advanced optical fibers provide unprecedented opportunities in many areas of science and technology, ranging from communications, high energy lasers and quantum networks to new families of adaptive optics systems. This course discusses the development of novel photonic devices and fibers to exploit the vastly unused spatial dimension of light for future optical networks providing low latency, low energy consumption and high bandwidth connectivity to ends users. Novel fiber solutions supporting denser transmission channels for submarine, edge-computing and datacenter networks are crucial to support our rapidly increasing demand for information.
We also review our recent progress to overcome fundamental physical limits of conventional fibers by moving away from guidance in a solid glass core. Recent endeavors in hollow-core fiber technology open a largely unexplored landscape rich with possibilities for numerous applications. The exploitation of custom designed hollow core fibers is an exciting pathway for future networks and laser systems.
Our group also pursues the development of photonic devices for the generation, control and sensing of convoluted light fields with structured intensity, polarization and phase. The spatial diversity of light is emerging as a key resource in multiple areas of optical research including wavefront sensing, AO and pointing/tracking applications.
Instructors: Rodrigo Amezcua Correa and Selim Habib
Download the Short Course Notes
Short Course Benefits:
Throughout the course, students will gain a deep understanding of the fundamental concepts underlying hollow-core gas-based nonlinear optics. Starting with an overview of ultrafast nonlinear optics, the course will cover extreme light-matter interaction in gas-filled hollow-core fibers, an overview of fundamental nonlinear optical processes such as self-phase modulation, soliton pulse propagation, photoionization and supercontinuum generation.
Short Course Audience:
Instructor Biography:
Rodrigo Amezcua Correa is a Professor at the College of Optics and Photonics at the University of Central Florida where he leads the Optical Fiber and Fiber Devices Laboratory. Rodrigo Amezcua received his PhD from Southampton University, UK. After that, he joined University of Bath, UK and worked at Powerlase Photonics developing industrial lasers. He has made breakthrough contributions in the field of optical fibers, fiber devices and optical fiber systems. His main interests comprise advanced fiber design and fabrication, SDM optical fiber communications, hollow core fibers, high-power fiber lasers, nonlinear fiber sources, optical sensors and high-power laser components.
Md Selim Habib received the PhD degree in Electrical and Photonics engineering from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in 2017. Following the completion of his doctoral studies, he joined as a Postdoctoral Researcher at CREOL, The College of Optics and Photonics, University of Central Florida, USA, from 2017 to 2019. From 2019 to 2023, Dr. Habib held the position of Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Florida Polytechnic University, USA. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at Florida Institute of Technology. His research mainly focuses on computational electromagnetics, emerging optical fiber design, fabrication and characterization and ultrafast nonlinear optics. He has published more than 50 articles in refereed journals with over 2,300 citations and an h-index of 26. Dr. Habib is a senior member of Optica and IEEE.
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SC511 - Power Scaling and Future Directions of Advanced Fiber Lasers
Sunday, 08 October
Instructor: Michalis Zervas, University of Southampton, UK
Short Course Description:
Provides an introduction to high power fiber lasers, describing the main cladding-pumping technologies and configurations, the importance of pump mixing, output beam quality and parameter affecting laser efficiency. It also discusses the main industrial laser characteristics and the impact on material processing. The course concentrates mainly on the status of continuous-wave (CW) and quasi-CW fiber laser power scaling and discusses the main power limiting physical effects and the importance of pump brightness. These include material strength, thermal and nonlinear effects—such as glass fracture/damage, mechanical reliability, thermal lensing, transverse mode instabilities (TMI) stimulated Raman and Brillouin scattering—as well as other effects such as photodarkening. Particular emphasis will be given to the underlying physics of TMI and its impact on power scaling in diode- and tandem-pumped fiber configurations. The pump power requirements and power limits will be discussed in more detail.
The short course finally covers future prospects and directions in high power fiber lasers for industrial and defense applications. It considers the development of the next generation of advanced fiber laser engines, based on single fiber and coherent-beam-combination architectures, with added functionality, reconfigurability and advanced laser/process monitoring, meeting the needs of smart future manufacturing. It also discusses novel laser control techniques using advanced machine learning approaches.
Download the Short Course Notes
Short Course Benefits:
This course should enable participants to:
- discuss and explain all the major issues related to fiber laser power scaling
- identify future directions in high power fiber laser technology
- specify operating signal/pump wavelengths for multi-kW fiber lasers
- identify the appropriate pumping configuration (diode-pumping/tandem-pumping) for a given output power
- specify the required pump brightness for a given output power
- determine the minimum core and cladding diameters for a given output powers
- define the minimum fiber length requirements for high power fiber lasers
- define and determine the critical pump brightness required for a given pumping configuration and output power
- define the TMI-limited power for a given amplifier gain saturation
- define the TMI-limited power for a given core/cladding ratio and dopant concentration
Participants should have basic understanding of or experience with fibres, laser physics and optical nonlinearities. This could include MSc/PhD students, post-graduate researchers, laser technology researchers, research and development engineers, manufacturing engineers and laser developers or any other open-minded individual eager to learn new topics.
Instructor Biography:
Michalis N. Zervas holds the Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Advanced Fibre Laser Technologies for Future Manufacturing in the University of Southampton, UK. He has published >350 papers and >40 patents in the areas of advanced optical fibre amplifier configurations, high power fibre lasers, fibre DFB lasers, Bragg grating theory and devices and non-linear fibre optics. He was a co-founder and served as Chief Scientist in SPI Lasers (now TRUMPF Lasers UK) from 2003 to 2016.
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Short Course Description:
Optical parametric oscillators (OPOs) based on c(2) nonlinear interaction are now firmly established as viable and versatile sources of widely tunable coherent radiation in difficult spectral regions inaccessible to lasers [1]. They are capable of delivering tunable radiation in all temporal domains from the continuous-wave (cw) to the ultrafast femtosecond time-scales [2,3], and can provide unprecedented optical powers at high conversion efficiency in excellent temporal, spectral, spatial beam quality. The development of novel nonlinear materials and the steady progress in pump laser technology, combined with the application of innovative device architectures, novel resonance and pumping schemes, have led to major advances in OPOs over the past decade. The development of new birefringent nonlinear crystals such as BiB3O6 and CdSiP2, the advent of quasi-phase-matched (QPM) materials such as MgO:PPLN, MgO:sPPLT, OP-GaP and OP-GaAs, the rapid progress in Yb-fiber laser technology in cw and ultrafast time-scales, and further advances in the ultrafast Ti:sapphire and other solid-state and femtosecond lasers, have had an unprecedented impact on OPOs and their advancement to new spectral and temporal limits. Combined with the application of innovative cascaded pumping and frequency up- and down-conversion schemes, these developments have led to major new breakthroughs in OPOs, and have led the realization of a new generation of tunable coherent light sources based on nonlinear frequency conversion that can now cover spectral regions from the ~250 nm in UV to ~14 mm in deep-IR, and can operate from cw to a few-cycle time-scales.
Download the Short Course Notes
Short Course Benefits:
This short course provides an overview of c(2) OPOs, covering topics from basic operation principles to advanced devices. The course will begin with a description of the fundamental concepts in nonlinear optics and frequency conversion, followed by a discussion of OPO devices, an overview of the latest advances in OPO technology and applications. The discussion will cover OPOs operating in all temporal regimes, from the cw to the ultrafast femtosecond time-scales. Specifically, course participants will gain knowledge of the basic principles of nonlinear frequency conversion and optical parametric generation; phase-matching, amplification and tuning; OPO design issues, including nonlinear material and pump laser selection criteria; OPO operation in different time-scales, generic device architectures, pumping and resonance configurations; cw OPOs: singly-resonant, pump-enhanced, doubly- and triply-resonant oscillators, pump power threshold and frequency behavior, frequency tuning and control, solid-state, fiber and semicondcutor disk laser pumping, visible to mid-IR generation, novel device architectures; pulsed OPOs: operating principle, threshold condition, compact all-solid-state oscillators, high-energy and low-energy devices, single-mode operation, UV to mid-IR and THz generation; synchronously-pumped OPOs: picosecond OPOs: high-repetition-rate cw and pulsed oscillators, solid-state, Ti:sapphire and fiber laser pumping, birefringent and QPM devices, UV to mid-IR generation; femtosecond OPOs: Ti:sapphire, solid-state and fiber-pumped devices, collinear and noncollinear pumping, birefringent and QPM oscillators, spectral and temporal control, UV to mid-IR generation; integrated waveguide and microcavity OPOs, applications of OPO devices in spectroscopy, trace gas sensing, imaging, frequency synthesis and comb generation; commercial developments in OPO technology.
Short Course Audience:
Instructor Biography:
Majid Ebrahim-Zadeh is an ICREA Professor at ICFO, Barcelona, Spain. He has been active in the advancement of OPOs for over 30 years and his research has spanned parametric sources from the UV to mid-IR, and in all time-scales from continuous-wave to ultrafast picosecond and few-cycle femtosecond domain. He has published more than 620 peer-reviewed articles, including 220 journal papers, over 110 invited, keynote and plenary talks and 14 post-deadline papers at major international conferences. He has been a regular instructor of the short course on OPOs at CLEO/USA (1996-2010) and CLEO/Europe (2007-2023). He is recipient of several honors and awards, including Innova Prize (2004), Berthold Leibinger Innovation Prize (2010) and David Richardson Medal of Optica (2021). He is a Fellow of Optica and SPIE. -
Short Course Description:
Nonlinear optics in a c(3) medium (such as glass fibers) has two key requirements: (a) energy conservation between the four participating photons and (b) (linear) momentum conservation. This latter requirement manifests as a phase-matching condition. In single-mode fiber optics, where all participating photons occupy the same spatial mode, the phase-matching condition reduces to a chromatic-dispersion tailoring problem. Multimode fibers, on the other hand, yield enhanced degrees of freedom for phase-matching, on account of the fact that phases can be matched across different spatial modes. In fact, one of the first demonstrations of fiber nonlinear optics (NLO) dates back to 1974, involving intermodal four-wave mixing between higher-order modes (HOMs) of a multimode fiber.
With the growing realization that ring-core fibers, and even simple step-index fibers, can enable stable propagation of a multitude of spatial modes carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM) or resembling diffraction-free Bessel beams, new selection rules for NLO are now evident. In addition to satisfying conventional phase matching rules (i.e., conserving linear momentum), these modes must also conserve angular momentum, leading to nonlinear interactions that must also account for the inherent chirality of the system. In addition, each mode possesses a distinct group velocity yielding rich nonlinear interactions for ultrashort pulses not observable in bulk media or single-mode fibers. Finally, many of these unique properties manifest in modes with record large mode areas, yielding a platform that is eminently power-scalable.
Download the Short Course Notes
Short Course Benefits:
This course will elucidate the exciting new nonlinear optical selection rules that have emerged from exploiting a plethora of stable fiber modes, and discuss how they are poised to impact fields as disparate as quantum computing and communications, information capacity scaling, power-scalable frequency generation, imaging and sensing.
Short Course Audience:
Instructor Biography:
After obtaining a a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Siddharth Ramachandran started his career at Bell Labs. After a decade in industrial research labs, he returned to academia, where he is currently a Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Boston University. His work on the understanding and development of lightwave devices comprising spatial, vectorial and topological complexity have been applied in the fields of quantum computing, optical networks, brain imaging, as well as laser based defence systems. For his contributions, he has been named a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at OFS (2003), a fellow of Optica (2010), IEEE (2019), SPIE (2019) and APS (2022), an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer (2013-2015), a Distinguished Visiting Fellow of the UK Royal Society of Engineering (2016) and a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellow (2019). He serves the optics and photonics community in several capacities, including, currently, as a deputy editor for Optica.
