Development opportunity
Günter Steinmeyer, from the Max Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short-Pulse Spectroscopy (MBI) in Berlin, is seeking partners to co-develop an optical fibre that can transmit ultrashort light pulses with distortions only twice the length of the initial duration of 13 femtoseconds (million-billionths of a second), over a distance of one metre.
The MBI fibre consists of glass capillaries that guide light on a width equal to about half the diameter of a human hair. The manufacture of the chirped fibre, carried out at the Saratov State University in Russia, is based on gluing five straws of different diameter then fitted into one another. The resulting structure enables detrimental resonances to be distributed over a wide wavelength range.
Steinmeyer highlights the fact that no other fibre-based technique can reduce distortion as chirped fibres, making them ideal for use in photodynamic therapy, which relies on accumulating a photosensitiser on cancerous cells, which, when exposed to light releases a substance that destroys the tumour cells, sparing the surrounding tissue layers. Steinmeyer also believes the chirped fibre technology could be applied to two-photon microscopy, which provides three-dimensional images of biological structures.
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