GrabFast · Graphene Based Ultrafast Lasers

Manipulating structure and composition in the nanoscale allows the creation of novel materials with superior performance for new products and devices. The introduction of a wide range of new low-cost nanomaterials is expected to have a disruptive impact on a variety of conventional inorganic semiconductor devices, not only because of performance/cost advantages, but also because they can be manufactured in more flexible ways, suitable for a growing range of applications.Graphene, a single layer of carbon allotrope, exhibits extraordinary optical and optoelectronic properties for ultrafast broadband photonics, including ultrafast response, high mobility, broadband absorption, and gate-variable optical conductivity, in addition to flexibility, robustness and environmental stability. My proposal aims to use graphene to create a new range of ultrafast lasers, such as ultrafast fiber, solid-state, and waveguide lasers. These lasers will break the spectrum and speed bottleneck of existing devices, and thus can provide cost-effective, energy-saving and robust tools with unprecedented speed and bandwidth, ideally fitting a large range of growing and emerging applications, such as high-speed telecommunication, industrial material processing, metrology, medicine and sensing applications. This is an ambitious frontier research program, with a strong interdisciplinary nature, across Engineering, Physics, Chemistry and Matter sciences.