Events

Ultra-long Fiber Lasers: from distributed Raman amplifiers to ultrafast pulsed sources

Juan Diego Ania-Castañón, Director of the Spanish National Research Council’s (CSIC) Institute of Optics, Coordinator of the Nanoscale and Nonlinear Guided Optics group

On Zoom only

Zoom Information

Zoom:https://rochester.zoom.us/j/95276747247?pwd=WlBieEFIWUg2N0Y3bDFsa25KcFZCQT09
Meeting ID: 952 7674 7247
Passcode: 964579

Abstract

Ultra-long fiber lasers, first proposed in 2004 and demonstrated in 2006 as a means for distributed amplification, have expanded over time into a broad family of devices, from Random distributed feedback fiber lasers to ultra-low repetition-rate femtosecond pulsed master oscillators, with interesting applications in areas such as telecommunications, supercontinuum generation, infrastructure monitoring or environmental sensing. In this talk I will review some of the milestones of ultra-long fiber laser technology over its nearly two decades of history, introduce some of our group’s latest developments and explore some possibilities for the future.

Biography

Juan Diego Ania-Castañón is the Director of the Spanish National Research Council’s (CSIC) Institute of Optics and the coordinator of its Nanoscale and Nonlinear Guided Optics group. Most of his career has been focused on the field of nonlinear fiber optics and its direct application to communications and sensing, working at the interface between the theoretical and the experimental. He obtained his PhD in theoretical physics in 2000 from Instituto de Estructura de la Materia (CSIC) and Universidad de Oviedo (Spain), under the supervision of Dr. Priscila García Fernández. In 2001 he joined the Photonics Research Group at Aston University in the UK, where he first proposed and demonstrated the concept of ultra-long Raman fiber lasers. After being awarded both a British EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship and a Spanish Ramón y Cajal Fellowship, he eventually joined joined Instituto de Óptica (CSIC) in 2007, establishing the Nonlinear Dynamics and Fiber Optics group (currently the Nanoscale and Nonlinear Guided Optics group) with other like-minded colleagues, where he continued his work on nonlinear fiber optics and their applications. He served for four years as Deputy Director of the institute, and was later appointed its Director in 2016. He has also served as Director for CSIC's joint Centre of Physics between 2018 and 2020, and is the co-founder of FOCUS S.L. (now part of APL Photonics), a company dedicated to optical fiber sensing. He is the author or co-author of more than 200 papers and holds multiple patents in the field of fiber lasers and amplifiers.