BRIGHTER lasers for tomorrow's technologies

Scientists and engineers across Europe have joined forces in a unique collaborative effort to develop a new generation of high-brightness lasers that will transform the fields of healthcare, communications and entertainment.

The €16.25m (with €9.7m of European Commission funding) project called WWW.BRIGHTER.EU, which runs until September 2009, has brought 22 of Europe's top research teams together from industry, internationally-recognised research laboratories and leading academic institutions to achieve the next quantum leap in this multi-billion Euro field by making lasers smaller, brighter, more efficient — and cheaper.

The project name stands for 'World Wide Welfare: High-Brightness Semiconductor Lasers for Generic Use', bringing together partners from 10 European countries and funded by the European Commission's Information Society Technologies Programme. The WWW.BRIGHTER.EU collaboration builds upon the successful WWW.BRIGHTER.EU project, which was completed in 2006.

The UK is represented in the BRIGHTER Consortium by two leading universities: The University of Nottingham and the University of Cambridge.

The main challenges addressed by the Consortium are to develop low-cost, high-brightness light sources for an extended range of colours (wavelengths) and to couple more light power into smaller diameter optical fibres. These improvements will, on the one hand, allow the replacement of existing cumbersome and expensive laser sources, and on the other hand facilitate the emergence of new applications.

Success for the Brighter EU scientists will present opportunities for society that are simply not available today, including improved cancer treatments, new medical diagnosis techniques and state-of-the-art communications and display systems for entertainment.

Project coordinator, Michel Krakowski of Alcatel-Thales III-V Lab in France, said: “There are huge markets for laser diode technology. There are a lot of applications that currently are not possible to address without high-powered diode lasers, either because of cost, colour or portability. The goal of this project is to develop new lasers with increased power and brightness. It's about how tightly we can focus the beam.”

In the UK, both the Photonic and Radio Frequency Engineering Group at The University of Nottingham and the Centre for Photonics Systems at Cambridge University are European leaders in the modelling and design of high-power and high-brightness laser diodes.