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PhD Graduate Wins Award for Young Researchers in Ultrafast Optics
Congratulations to Bowen Li – a PhD graduate of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering – who has been awarded the 2021 Bernard J. Couillaud Prize, which supports early-career researchers in the field of ultrafast photonics and its applications.
Bowen is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His proposal focuses on the first counter-propagating all-normal dispersion (CANDi) fibre laser, which is an innovative dual-comb laser source that produces two frequency combs from a single fibre laser cavity.
The novel dual-comb design shows that bidirectional mode-locking in a fibre laser is possible using an artificial saturable absorber and all-normal dispersion. Compared with existing dual-comb fibre lasers, the CANDi fibre laser generates pulse energies with higher orders of magnitude and optical spectra that are completely overlapping and flat directly from the single cavity. It is expected that the CANDi fibre laser can be used in various applications, such as molecular spectroscopy, biochemical imaging, and precise laser ranging.