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Village Project PartnersThe MIR tunable source and resulting spectrometric sensor at the core of the VILLAGE project will benefit from several proven trends in the field of emerging photonic components in which the partners have leading positions. The consortium comprises two industrial partners, one of them being a SME with major involvement in the project, and three academic teams.Thales Research and Technology (TRT):Thales is one of the world premier professional electronics groups and a major player in numerous commercial markets. It has a revenue of over € billion, 65,000 employees and is present in over 40 countries. Thales Corporate Research Centre (formerly Thomson-CSF LCR), located near Paris, is the main multidisciplinary research unit of the Thales group. With over 250 highly skilled staff, 13000 sq. m of labs of which 1700 sq. m isof clean rooms, its research teams perform pioneering work in the most advanced areas of optics & optoelectronics, electronic components for microwave applications, advanced interconnect and packaging, materials, software architecture and cognitive science. In the Laser & Nonlinear Optics Laboratory, research has been active on Quasi-Phase Matching since 1989, and on orientation-patterned GaAs for IR applications since 1993. It presently holds a dominant position in this new promising field. Specific skills and equipment suited to enable further progress in this domain include:
TRT will be in charge of the VILLAGE project coordination. Web: www.research.thalesgroup.com/
Norsk Elektro Optikk (NEO):Norsk Elektro Optikk A/S is a SME which was established in 1985 as a privately owned research oriented company within the field of electro optics. The founders had their scientific and technical background from the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, which for the last 30-40 years has been the leading research organisation in electro optics in Norway. The company has since its start grown to be one of the largest independent research and development organisations in electro optics in Norway, and has during the last 5 years established itself as a world leading manufacturer of gas monitoring instruments for industrial applications and emission control based on single mode tuneable NIR diode lasers. The company's main areas of expertise are in activities involving various spectroscopic techniques, the use of lasers and NIR detectors, and the use of digital (CCD) cameras, both single line and two dimensional cameras. TDL based instruments in the NIR spectral range have been widely accepted by the industrial users and NEO alone has more than 1500 instruments installed in more than 30 countries in Europe, America, Asia and Australia.Web: www.neo.no
Institute of Experimental Physics, Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf (HHUD):The group headed by Prof. S. Schiller is devoted to the development and application of lasers to high resolution optical measurement techniques. Its activities include the development of new, ultra-stable single-frequency sources for fundamental and applied spectroscopy, in part based on nonlinear optical frequency conversion, and their use for applied spectroscopy (trace gas analysis), frequency metrology and fundamental tests of physics (determination of fundamental constants, tests or Special Relativity).The group has been working on cw-OPO development and applications since 1993. In the past it has worked closely together with producers of periodically poled crystals to extend the performance of its cw-OPOs, demonstrating wide emission ranges, and wavelengths as long as 4 µm. All cw-OPO devices developed were single-frequency sources. In parallel with the development work on the cw-OPOs themselves, the systems were applied to spectroscopic studies, in part within collaborations with other institutions. The group was the first to demonstrate that cw-OPOs are suited for advanced spectroscopic methods such as Doppler-free spectroscopy, hole-burning spectroscopy, photoacoustic spectroscopy, cavity ring-down spectroscopy. The group's most important contributions to the device side of cw- OPOs may be summarized as follows: - Highest conversion efficiency (81%) - First demonstration of mode-hop-free oscillation over essentially unlimited time - First reliable and single-frequency cw-OPO using periodically poled crystals (in 1997) - The largest spectral coverage by a single OPO system (0.56 - 2.67 µm) - First demonstration of active frequency stabilization The developments also resulted in a US and EU patent that was licensed to the German company LINOS AG. It manufactures a cw-OPO based on this patent which was the first cw- OPO commercially available in the world. On the applications side, the group has recently shown that cw-OPOs are suitable sources to perform trace-gas detection with highest sensitivity (at the level of parts per trillion). Web: www.exphy.uni-duesseldorf.de/
Optoelectronics Research Centre, University of Southampton (ORC):The ORC has a 35- years history of research and development in the fields of optoelectronics and laser science. It is best known for its pioneering contributions to the field of fibre technology, where it has a strong track record of innovation and where it has been responsible for the development of a wide range of new fibres (including rare earth doped fibres, micro- structured fibres and novel fibre geometries) and novel fibre devices (including the erbium- doped fibre amplifier and all-fibre distributed feedback laser). The centre has a state-of-the-art fibre fabrication facility, UV fibre grating writing and clean room facilities, and over 60 laser/photonics laboratories with over 130 research-active staff and students. The ORC has throughout its history had strong links with other academic institutions and with industry, and has been actively engaged in a number of successful collaborative research programmes funded by the EU and other sponsors. The ORC has also been very active in seeking commercial exploitation of its research output through the formation of very close links with industry and through the formation of spin-out companies (e.g. SPI, Stratophase).Of particular relevance for this project is the collective expertise of the ORC investigators in the areas of high-power (cladding-pumped) continuous-wave and pulsed fibre lasers, DFB fibre lasers, fibre fabrication, fabrication of in-fibre Bragg gratings, and techniques for linewidth control and wavelength tuning. The ORC was one of the first groups to demonstrate over 1kW output power from an Yb-doped fibre laser operating in the ~1.0-1.1µm regime, as well as narrow linewidth and single-polarisation master-oscillator power-amplifier (MOPA) devices at the multi-hundred watt power level and high-average-power pulsed MOPA sources. The ORC has in parallel played a lead role in investigating power scaling of fibre lasers based on erbium and thulium operating in the 1.5µm and 2µm regimes. The ORC is also responsible for the first demonstration of an all-fibre distributed feedback (DFB) fibre laser, and, in collaboration with industrial partner SPI, the ORC has demonstrated the highest power (~400mW) so far achieved from a single DFB fibre laser in the ~1 µm wavelength regime without external amplification. Web: www.orc.soton.ac.uk/
University of Valladolid (UVA):The group involved in the project is a University department specialized in the characterization of semiconductor materials and devices. Several semiconductors such as InP, GaAs, SiC, GaN, InGaP, SiGe, GaAs/Si, laser diodes, Si, SOI/SIMOX and SiGe have been studied in the past. A wide range of experimental equipments allowing optical characterization with micrometric or sub-micrometric spatial resolution are currently available in this group, including Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), Micro-Raman spectroscopy, Spectrum image cathodoluminescence, Optical interferometry in the Phase Stepping Mode. A SNOM (Scanning near field optical microscope) will also be available. Only a few laboratories at an European scale actually combine these experimental techniques applied to the study of III-V compounds.Web: www.uva.es/
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