Postgraduate research opportunities

Optical fibre nanowires are submicrometric structures fabricated by adiabatically stretching optical fibres, thus preserve the original dimensions of the optical fibre at their input and output. Optical fibre nanowires are of interest for a range of emerging fibre optic applications since they offer a number of enabling optical and mechanical properties, including large evanescent fields (a considerable fraction of the transmitted power can propagate in the evanescent field outside of a nanowire), high nonlinearity (light can be confined to a very small area over long device lengths allowing the ready observation of nonlinear interactions) and extreme flexibility (bend radii of the order of a few microns can be readily achieved). This project concerns the fabrication of optical fibre nanowires from silica and compound glass fibres. Different manufacturing methods will be investigated to optimise the nanowire properties. Devices exploiting the unique mechanical and optical properties are also to be explored and elements of the work are likely to be performed in conjunction with other research groups. These include applications for optics, sensing, biology and chemistry.

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