Double Success at IEEE Photonics Conference

Dr Lavery and Dr Balakier were both invited to present post-deadline papers to the IEEE Photonics Conference in Orlando this October

The invitation to present was a high profile success for ICCS, with researchers from UCL Electronic and Electrical Engineering department's Photonics Group and the Optical Networks Group presenting their work to the IEEE Photonics Conference post-deadline session. The IEEE Photonics Society, who organise the event, state that "The purpose of post-deadline papers is to give participants the opportunity to hear new and significant material in rapidly advancing areas. Only those papers judged to be truly excellent and compelling in their timeliness will be accepted." UCL EEE presented two out of just seven papers accepted for this special session at the close of the conference.

Dr Katarzyna Balakier, a Research Associate in the Photonics Group, attended the conference after being awarded a Travel Grant by the IEEE Photonics Society Fund. She presented a paper entitled "Photonic Integrated Circuit Optical Phase Lock Loop Tuneable Active Filter", which described the first foundry-fabricated photonic integrated circuit optical phase lock loop tuneable active optical filter for optical frequency comb line selection and optical amplification.

“We have created Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs) acting as highly selective optical filters, with better performance (insertion loss, bandwidth, out-of-band suppression) and much smaller footprint than those of the top-of-the-range conventional optical filters or alternative photonic-integrated solutions. This world first demonstration is a major advance towards the development of photonics-based millimetre-wave and THz sources for communication, spectroscopy and space applications." said Dr Balakier.

Dr Domaniç Lavery, a Lecturer and Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow, was originally invited to the conference to present his work on digital nonlinearity compensation in short reach optical networks. His post-deadline submission, entitled "A 32x10 Gb/s OLT Using a Single Ultra-wide Bandwidth Dual Local Oscillator Coherent Receiver", described a new coherent receiver design which enabled access to an unprecedented bandwidth in last mile networks.

"We showed that a simple change to the structure of a coherent optical receiver can have a huge impact on bandwidth efficiency; as long as the receiver design is matched to the network design," said Dr. Lavery. "We hope that this demonstration will encourage researchers to think again about coherent technologies for these low-cost networks."

Their papers and presentations will shortly be available via the conference website.

About the IEEE Photonics Conference:
The 2017 IEEE Photonics Conference (IPC) was hosted in Orlando, FL, 1st-5th October.

IPC is hosted annually, and offers technical presentations by the world’s leading scientists and engineers in the areas of lasers, optoelectronics, optical fibre networks, and associated lightwave technologies and applications.
https://www.photonicssociety.org/conferences/ieee-photonics-conference