Optics is widely seen as a key technology for the 21st century. The exponential growth of Internet traffic, for instance, presents an enormous opportunity for the companies that build and sell the lasers, amplifiers, optical fibres that make up the world’s communications infrastructure. Indeed, it is estimated that the market for fibre-optic components will be worth over $20bn in three years’ time. Lasers and other optical technologies will also play a crucial role in healthcare, manufacturing, and the defence and aerospace industries.
The pervasive influence of optics was spelt out in a 1998 report by the US National Research Council (NRC) called “Harnessing Light”. Many countries around the world have grasped the message contained in this report and invested accordingly. However, although the UK has made major contributions in many areas of optics in the last 15 years, many scientists and engineers feel that Britain could fall behind in the optics industry. Indeed, in a recent review of physics in the UK (Physics World June p5), an international panel of physicists expressed concern at the UK’s level of investment in optics.
With Internet traffic doubling every 100 days, it will not be long before the current capacity, or “bandwidth”, is exceeded. In order to increase bandwidth, telecoms companies must either increase the rate at which they can send data along optical fibres, or replace the electronic components that limit the performance of optical networks.
The complete replacement of electrons by photons – the shift from optoelectronic to photonic technology – is a holy grail in communications. But this shift will require the development of new materials with high optical nonlinearities and fast response times. There are many materials that offer one of these properties but none offer both. Many in industry, therefore, believe that the answer to the Internet’s potential bottleneck lies with fundamental research.
One class of materials currently undergoing intense research is “photonic crystals”, a material with a photonic band gap – the optical equivalent of the energy band gap found in semiconductors. Photonic crystals would allow light to be directed around much sharper bends than is currently possible with fibres. Microelectromechanical devices (MEMS) are another active area of research. A MEMS device would use tiny mechanical mirrors to switch optical signals.
Many in industry and academia, however, think that such blue-sky research is being stifled in the UK. David Hanna of the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) at Southampton University believes that good research ideas in optics are not being funded quickly enough. “I think we are doing extremely well with what we are given,” he says, “but we are being held back by limited resources.” Since optical technologies are so pervasive, they usually only plays a secondary role in larger systems, and Hanna believes that their economic importance is often not fully recognized. Another problem is that optics research in universities is carried out in a range of different departments – physics, chemistry, materials, electronics, engineering and computing. “No one involved in the field has the full view,” says Hanna, “and so optics does not get the share of the funding that it should get.”
A recent review of UK photonics said that it is not appropriate for the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to impose lists of preferred technologies when selecting research proposals. Universities should provide the scientific knowledge base that companies can then draw on to select the most appropriate technologies, according to the report. The review panel recommended that EPSRC should increase funding of its photonics research by at least 30%, and ideally by 50%, from its present level of about £70m every year, within the next two years.
UK industry has a poor record of investing in optics. Although the UK produces about half of Europe’s optical components, most of the industry is owned by foreign companies such as Nortel, JDS Uniphase and Agilent. And earlier this year, BT sold its world-leading photonics research centre to US firm Corning. However, there are some promising signs – last year Marconi separated from its parent company GEC to concentrate on telecommunications, and the number of photonics start-up companies is on the rise.
“Traditionally the UK has had a strong science and technology base in photonics, with good inward investment, but the difficulty has been converting research into production,” says Andrew Rickman, chief executive of Bookham Technology, a UK optical components company. “But there is now a change in tide: people are now prepared to invest in start-up companies.”
Indeed, last month a spin-off company from the ORC attracted the largest ever investment for a university start up. Southampton Photonics received £37m of venture capital to design and manufacture fibre-optic components, and says it will create 200 skilled jobs in the UK over the next 18 months. Several other UK universities have produced start-up companies, including several in southern Scotland.
To encourage more collaboration between universities and industry, the Department of Trade and Industry and EPSRC last month put £11m into a new “LINK” scheme, which will run over five years. “The UK has a world-class reputation in optical technologies,” says the UK science minister Lord Sainsbury, “and the new LINK programme will do much to ensure that this research is exploited by UK-based companies for the benefit of the UK economy.”
Although Colin Webb of Oxford University, and president of the UK Consortium for Photonics and Optics, welcomes the LINK scheme, he believes it provides only about a quarter of the funding needed. “One wonders whether the UK’s investment will have the desired effect,” he says, “as similar government support schemes have done in the US and Germany.”
Many within the photonics community are worried whether the UK will be able to supply industry with the qualified people it needs to expand. Rickman hopes that Bookham will eventually employ thousands of people, but is uncertain about where the company will find the personnel in the long run. He says Bookham has had to work very hard to recruit engineers, and describes the training required to provide employees with the relevant technical knowledge as “effectively starting up your own university”.
The chairman of Southampton Photonics, David Payne, shares this sentiment, saying that the problem boils down to a lack of students taking science and technology subjects at university. Indeed, many science and engineering PhD students in the UK are from abroad. “The UK has a serious problem with engineering – it is still seen as a second-class profession. Students going through university all want to be in finance or the media rather than manufacturing.” He points out that in the US studying science and engineering is seen as a stepping stone to becoming a rich entrepreneur.
To try and combat the shortage of people trained in optics, the panel reviewing EPSRC’s photonics research recommended that some of the additional funding proposed for the area should be devoted to increasing the number of project studentships. The panel also suggested that there should be more interdisciplinary research between physicists, engineers, materials scientists, chemists, mathematicians and those working in IT. This is something recognized by EPSRC’s chief executive, Richard Brook, who says that EPSRC may in the future devote more attention to its “interdisciplinary research collaborations”.
One such collaboration that has just been set up in the physics department at St Andrews University in Scotland could lead to new ways of increasing Internet bandwidth. The department has received a grant of £10.5m to work with five other universities and eight companies on the application of ultrashort (femtosecond) optical pulses. They will carry out research on novel materials, including organic compounds and small-scale structures in semiconductors. The team hope to achieve a three to four orders of magnitude improvement in data rates in what they say will be “an aggressive research programme with a long-term ‘blue skies’ content”.
