The UA collaborates in a study that demonstrates how 3D printing of nanostructures allows the generation of light beams

ALICANTE, 9 Ene. (EUROPE PRESS) -

The University of Alicante (UA) has collaborated in a study that demonstrates how 3D printing of nanostructures on the tip of an optical fiber allows the generation of structured light beams with independent control of the polarization and phase of the light beam at each point. of the wave front. The work has been published in the journal 'Nature Communications'.

The UA has collaborated in this research through the work of the professor of Applied Physics and member of the Holography and Optical Processing Group (GHPO), Andrés Márquez. "Our work provides a paradigm for advancing fiber optic science and technology toward fiber-integrated light shaping, which may find important applications in fiber communications, fiber lasers and sensors, endoscopic imaging, fiber lithography and lab-on-fiber technology", indicate the signatories of the study.

Optical fibers are present on a daily basis in today's society as fundamental elements that have allowed, in recent decades, the explosion in the capacity to transmit information associated with the rise of the Internet and mobile communications. Many of the home internet supply lines, for example, pass through these fibers whose core diameter is ten times smaller than a hair.

With this, the information transmission capacity has increased at an "exponential rate" thanks to advances in technologies such as laser sources or receivers used in the links and also in all digital processing electronics and new data coding methods. the signal to increase the efficiency of the physical transport channel, which is the fiber.

According to the UA researcher, "one of the fundamental advances began in the 90s, with the introduction of wavelength multiplexing, which allows the same fiber channel to be used to simultaneously transport several dozen or even hundreds of optical signals with wavelengths very close to each other, but which nevertheless propagate independently.

According to the UA, light is "an electromagnetic wave that allows information to be transported through the modification of its properties. In the most advanced applications, these properties can be modified at a local level, so that the wave front is not homogeneous , but rather it has a structure, so these light beams can have very different structures."

These structured beams allow, for example, that in optical communications "several channels of information can be transmitted simultaneously where the difference between them is the structure of their wavefront, which allows increasing the information transmission capacity that today's society needs. ".

To be able to "write" this information at a local level in a beam of light, it is necessary to interact at a nanometric level with the wave front, which is possible through metasurfaces, which have emerged in the last decade and are formed by structural units of submicron sizes, the so-called metaatoms, "which, just as an atom would do, interact with the incident light by absorbing it, delaying it or changing its plane of polarization," Márquez detailed.

As the article has shown, "the revolution in 3D printing techniques using special printers, which combine ultrafast laser writing beams (femtosecond lasers) and polymers that polymerize in multiphoton reactions, has been essential to be able to meet the objectives pursued in the present investigation."

The work is the result of collaboration between various groups and research centers from Germany, Australia, England and Brazil, among which is also the Holography and Optical Processing group (GHPO) of the University Institute of Physics Applied to Sciences and Technologies (IUFACyT) of the University of Alicante, to which Professor Andrés Márquez belongs.

Various stays carried out by the UA professor at the Nanoinstitute of the University of Munich "have made it possible to gather the necessary specialties to be able to carry out such a complex project both at the level of theoretical foundations, design and simulation, manufacturing and evaluation at an experimental level of the manufactured devices", the researcher himself concluded.