Bill Corcoran

Accepting PhD Students

PhD projects

Rainbows on Demand (ARC DP19) This project aims to create photonic circuit technologies that will generate hundreds of coherent laser lines from a single chip. The emerging industrially scalable silicon nitride on thin-film lithium niobate platform will be advanced to create resonant modulators and nonlinear waveguides with unprecedented efficiency and innovative monitoring and control techniques. When combined, these components will enable highly flexible and robust systems for generating a comb of coherent laser lines. These photonic chip comb sources will be inexpensive, compact and energy efficient with transformative impact in spectroscopy, microscopy, precision measurement, quantum computing and ultra-fast optical fibre communications. Needle in a Haystack: Brillouin processing (ARC DP19) The project aims to apply Brillouin processing to the development of an innovative self-tracking optical filter for isolating optical carriers in the coherent receiver of future ultrahigh bit-rate optical communication systems. By recovering a needle-like optical carrier with great precision from a drifting sea of wide-band noise and data channels, the project expects to minimise the effect of optical carrier distortions on the data-carrying signals. The project should advance knowledge in optical signal processing and communications technologies, with outcomes that increase the data-carrying capacity of optical networks. Future telecommunication networks should benefit through improved transmission rates and extended fibre links.