Osiński Receives 1.3M Grant from ONR

July 25, 2017

Osiński Receives 1.3M Grant from ONR

ECE Professor Marek Osiński was recently awarded a $1.3M grant from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in Arlington, VA.

Dr Osiński is planning to develop a novel ultrafast laser transmitter technology and this project is expected to have a revolutionary impact on the field of fundamental and applied physics of semiconductor lasers --- bringing forth a new class of ring-laser-based integrated ultrafast sources.

"While the specific application of interest to ONR is cryogenic data egresss, this project will have a much broader range of applications," said Osiński, who is the Principal Investigator for this project. "Ultra-high-speed on-chip modulation of integrated lasers is an important holy grail for the ever increasing demand for ultrafast communication."

Osiński explained that the development of inexpensive ultrafast chips operating at speeds exceeding 100 GHz will have a huge societal impact.

"These chips will increase the transmission capacity of fiber-based networks and directly impact G5 wireless networks, Internet, local area networks, metropolitan area networks, and long-haul backbones, thus bringing closer the concept of a networked society."

Osiński's project explores the use of semiconductor ring lasers to provide energy-efficient high-speed data egress from cryogenic environment of superconducting electronic for further processing at room-temperature.

This new project, aiming at fabrication and testing of prototype devices, is a continuation of an earlier grant award from ONR that supported numerical simulation of strongly injection locked whistle-geometry ring lasers (WRLs). That award, totaling $400,000, began in April of 2015 and will end in September 2017.

Please click this sentence to read more about this project.

Marek Osiński came to UNM 31 years ago as one of the first researchers at UNM’s Center for High Technology Materials (CHTM). He is a Fellow of the International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE) (‘02); a Fellow of the Optical Society of America (’03); a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), IEEE Photonics Society, and IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (‘15); and a member of the Materials Research Society. He is serving as Associate Editor of the IEEE Photonics Journal.

Osiński has authored or co-authored over 520 technical papers and five book chapters. He also co-edited 23 books of SPIE conference proceedings on “Physics and Simulation of Optoelectronic Devices” and 18 other SPIE volumes in the fields of advanced high-power lasers, optoelectronics, nano-biophotonics, and colloidal nanoparticles for biomedical applications. He holds 16 UNM-affiliated U.S.-issued patents, including 2 patents supporting the whistle-geometry ring-laser technology described above. From 2006 till 2012 he was Program Director and PI of UNM's $3.1 million fellowship program on Integrating Nanotechnology with Cell Biology and Neuroscience, funded by the National Science Foundation under Integrated Graduate Education Research Traineeship (IGERT) program.