Photonic Technologies

Summary at the halfway point

Energy is produced from a relatively small portion of solar radiation hitting the photovoltaic cells. The rest is lost mainly as heat. PW researchers are working on a material with a negative refraction index, which will not only eliminate the cell heating but also will allow us to enhance the energy yield.

Open call for team members for the marathon of work on practical solutions and demonstrators in the areas of biomedical engineering, photonic technologies, cybersecurity and data analysis, energy conversion and storage.

Scientists from the Faculty of Electronics and Information Technology at WUT are devising a new measurement method which facilitates obtaining highly sensitive, selective and, at the same time, universal sensor, and biosensor solutions. Research is conducted as part of the FOTECH-1 research grant.

Optical measuring methods are widely used in research on technical objects on a macro-scale or to observe the biological microworld world, among other things. Techniques generating a band image are an especially interesting group. As part of the Photonic Technologies grant, WUT scientists have undertaken to “purify” this image to observe and research the microworld around us even more precisely. 

In 2017 during laboratory work, researchers at the Warsaw University of Technology for the first time observed a photonic structure in nematic liquid crystals dispersed with nanoparticles of gold. The observation led to the publication of research findings in 2019 in ACS Nano - the upper decile journal. The scientists did not stop their work and continued their research as part of the implementation of the research grant awarded in the FOTECH-1 competition. An article just published in Communications Materials (Nature group) describes this work. 

At present, from the perspective of optical fibre communications, we need further progress in eliminating certain defects of photonic systems under research, such as insufficiently quick response time to the external electric field (tens of milliseconds) and the necessity to use high steering voltage due to a big diameter of the photonic optical fibre (hundreds of volts). Scientists at WUT are working on solving these problems. Their research project is implemented as part of the FOTECH-2 research grant funded within the programme ‘Excellence Initiative – Research University’ implemented at the Warsaw University of Technology.

A team of researchers from the WUT and Centre for Physical Sciences and Technology (FTMC) based in Vilnius, headed by Agnieszka Siemion, PhD from the Faculty of Physics at the Warsaw University of Technology, is working on the use of terahertz radiation in imaging phantoms of healthy and cancerous tissues. The research is implemented as part of FOTECH-1 research grant competition.

PhotonHub Europe, a new pan-European hub for digital innovations in the field of photonics, with the Warsaw University of Technology as one of its partners, has received EUR 19 million in funding under the EU Horizon 2020 program. The hub will support the development of small and medium-sized enterprises.