The University of Southampton

Airguide Photonics, hosted at the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) is a £6m EPSRC-funded research programme aiming to revolutionise fibre optics.

About Airguide Photonics

Airguide Photonics builds upon the outstanding success of previous Hollow Core Fibre (HCF) research, led by Professor David Richardson, as part of the broader activities of the EPSRC-funded Photonics HyperHighway (PHH) programme grant, and of other complementary programs such as the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Photonics and MODEGAP.

After 45 years of solid-core silica fibre dominance, the way we think about fibres will change through new and practical properties that break the mould.

Professor David Richardson FREng - Principal Investigator, Airguide Photonics

Through these projects the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC), which is leading the Airguide Photonics programme, has firmly established itself at the forefront of HCF technology, breaking world-records for vacuum light-speed data communication, including the longest transmission distance and the highest data capacity, and improving state-of-the art (SotA) results by >10 and >10,000 times, respectively.

Our research team has also demonstrated unprecedentedly-long lengths of uniform low-loss HCF as well as achieving world-first demonstrations of data transmission at the minimum loss window of HCFs (2000nm) and in a novel anti-resonant HCF with an 8x wider bandwidth than SotA data transmitting HCFs, as well as the world’s most radiation-hard and the most temperatureinsensitive optical fibres exploiting HCFs.

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