The mail goal of this proposal is the recruitment of a postdoctoral researcher from other countries to explore an innovation business idea, the development of a Femtosecond (Fs) Temporally Coherent Supercontinuum (SC) Fiber Laser for Multi-Photon Microscopy (MPM). FYLA LASER S.L. expects to recruit a highly qualified specialist in photonics, that is not available on the Spanish job market, but whose knowledge would be crucial to open up opportunities for innovation and significant growth for the enterprise. This project will contribute to place FYLA in an advanced position versus competitors in the field of non-linear microscopy, as the first worldwide manufacturing company of Fs Temporally Coherent SC Fiber Laser. FEMTOCOLORS will develop the technologies necessary to realize efficient laser emission in the visible in the all-fiber laser configuration. With this regard, the Innovation Associate will address the challenges currently not overcome to develop coherent SC lasers of pulsewidths down to 10 fs, covering the VIS region.

Particle physics attracts a global community of more than 10,000 scientists, and Europe’s leadership, with CERN as its major laboratory, is internationally recognised. Discoveries are technology-driven; more performant accelerators require innovative detectors to unfold their scientific potential, driving available or emerging technologies beyond their limits. The role of industry is rapidly increasing, due to the need for highly specialised equipment and due to the scale of the installations, where thousands or millions of components require industrial-scale infrastructure. AIDAinnova advances the European detector development infrastructures through fostering an intensified co-innovation with industry. Based on the success of the previous EC-funded initiatives AIDA and AIDA-2020, the project as a novel element fully integrates commercial players, 10 industrial companies and 3 RTOs, together with academic institutions into the consortium, which comprises 46 partners from 15 countries. Knowledge transfer will be catalysed through co-innovative work in common detector projects, and it will strengthen the competence and competitiveness of the industrial partners in other markets. AIDAinnova provides state-of-the-art upgrades of research infrastructure such as test beam and irradiation facilities, and it covers all key technologies for future detectors, following the guidance by the European Particle Physics Strategy Update. The focus is on strategic developments at intermediate technological readiness levels TRL 2-7, where developments are not yet as specific to one particular experiment as in the engineering phase, and it also includes prospective R&D at TRL 1. Therefore, AIDAinnova will unfold synergies by bringing together the expertise from communities aiming at various future projects and maximise the use of resources. Through the large leverage on matching funds from national sources the project leads to enhanced coherence and coordination at a European level.

Our vision is to develop novel, unconventional techniques for multi-dimensional biomedical optical imaging for the detection and mapping of absorption, scattering, and fluorescence, in biological tissues using visible and near-infrared light. The possibility of detecting other dimensions like time and wavelength, together with space, dramatically improves the imaging and diagnostic power of biomedical devices. So far, this capability is strongly hampered by the fact that most of the biomedical instrumentation works trying to maximize the number of measurements (pixel, raster scans, ...) regardless of the information content, thus leading to a huge amount of data to manage, transfer and analyze, with consequent bottleneck and gap between measurement and result. CONcISE will overcome these limitations thanks to an outstanding research and training programme based on the vision that (i) a system as a whole includes both hardware and software integrated and working together, (ii) acquisition and detection are piloted by information content derived by the sample under an adaptive, data-driven framework. Under this approach, ESRSs will be capable of leading and boosting the biomedical imaging industry towards the development of a new generation of devices, with a strong impact in the sector and in general healthcare. The consortium, balanced among EU experts with computational, experimental and industrial competences, will provide ESRs with a unique, advanced, multi-disciplinary training covering all the aspects of the biomedical imaging science: modelling, design, development, data analysis, validation and translation to the application.

IPN-Bio (Integrated Photonic-Nano Technologies for Bio-applications) aims to foster and develop long-term international, interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral collaboration between Europe, USA, Latin America and China. IPN-Bio consortium consists of 13 world-leading organisations from eight countries (4 EU universities, 3 EU companies, 6 TC Partner organisations) working at the frontier of the field with the complementary expertise in the multidiscipline of Photonics, Nanotechnology and Biotechnology. IPN-Bio will implement strategies of excellence science through a total of 218 person-month of structured international and inter-sectoral staff exchanges involving 36 individual researchers. The R&I staff exchanges and network activities will provide an excellent platform for the exchanged researchers to share the knowledge and ideas, transfer the skills and boost career opportunities. The project’s objectives and challenges present a balanced mix between industrial application focused knowledge transfer and development and more far-looking studies for potentially ground-breaking applications by exploiting new emerging opportunities with the integration of photonics technology and advanced nanomaterials for the applications in health care, biomedical diagnosis, food safety and environmental monitoring. The IPN-Bio network will forge strong collaborative relationships between participating organisations, push Europe at the forefront of global biophotonics research community, and strengthen Europe’s human capital, competitiveness and economy growth.

FYLA, which is a company highly specialised in the design, production and manufacturing of ultrafast fibre lasers, is requesting the SME instrument for their innovative product LASERCOMB. It is an outstanding fibre laser frequency comb that will enable the new communication paradigm based on Elastic Optical Networks (EONs) and Super-Channels. One of the major challenges of photonics is to provide cost-effective technology to boost the broadband internet and allow current demands in terms of traffic growth, fast network changes and varying traffic. For that purpose, network architecture innovations are needed to get faster, more transparent, dynamic and greener broadband networks, providing super-channels to offer connectivity with a wide range of bandwidths, dynamic over both time and direction. In this context, optical fibre laser combs feeding EONs will fulfil requirements of future core networks. LASERCOMB solution is a fibre laser frequency comb that will enable the new communication paradigm based on EONs and super-channels. It is an ultrafast GHz-rate pulsed optical fibre laser with better performance, flexible design and lower costs than the current state of the art solutions. Regarding flexibility, it is capable of generating a comb of multiple carriers (>1000) to feed multiple channels, offering wide flexibility in the fundamental frequency (1-25GHz) and bandwidth (1.5-20nm) of the carriers. Main advantages of LASERCOMB are: - High quality signals. - Multiple carriers generated from unique source (laser comb), providing coherence between carriers. - Long-term stable emission (hours and days of operation). - Robustness (increase life-time up to 5 times). - Reduce size and weight (at least 80%) - Reduce cost (50% compared to other comb lasers and 75% compared to current transceivers of diode arrays). - Enables multiprotocol technology to be used in optical networks but also in WIFI, Radio, ROF, Satellite, etc.