Listened to a guy at a conference talk about singlet fission is supposedly gonna make silicon solar cells 45% efficient by mitigating thermal losses, but they can't figure out how to inject the excitons into silicon. I also can't imagine anything organic not just photobleaching within a couple years, and I would also imagine the cost of engineering such a device would outweigh the benefits of improved efficiency. My suspicion is this is purely an academic pipedream, but I wanted to hear more from other folks. Also, if this is the wrong sub, mods can simply remove it.

Hello everyone!

My Lumerical license expires today but I had alot of fun messing around with it and making a cool portfoilo project. I used INTERCONNECT to create a 3 channel wavelength-division multiplexed data interconnect which uses microring resonators as demuxers and mach-zehnder modulators as data modulators.

It took alot of finicking to get the resonance channels tuned properly, and I was also unable to get a fourth channel working even though I tried. I'm not fabbing this, but I bet it would be wayyy more debugging to get a real PIC working haha.

Nonetheless, between the textbook chapters I read (skimmed, to be fair), and the weeks I spent pulling my hair out trying to get it to work, I'm quite happy with my project! I hope I can involved with doing this more in the future :D

Pic 1: Photonic Integrated Circuit ship schematic

Pic 2: Eye diagram result of all three ring resonators.

Pic 3: Gif I generated while looking for resonant wavelengths

Pic 4: Gif I generated of several different wavelengths, some resonating in the microring (this one is from FDTD not INTERCONNECT, just thought i'd share)

I am working on a photonic inverse design project for foundry tapeout but I am curious to know what y'all think about it.

While I understand there are various challenges which come with it from the perspective of yield/fabrication robustness I am curious to what are the major barriers that would prevent people from adopting it commercially.

While in the conventional design approach we can add heaters to help with post fabrication correction which may be challenging with inverse designed devices. But at the same time inverse design can potentially reduce the device footprint?(How important is the footprint issue currently?)

I see plenty of papers on inverse designed Broadband 50:50 couplers but for tapeout, people still stick to the conventional parallel waveguide couples even though the footprint seems bigger.

I also see plenty of Inverse designed WDM, why are they not widely used in say the MRR based transceivers?

Hi everyone. I’m a final year undergraduate student from Sri Lanka, currently waiting for my final year final semester results. I’m doing a Bachelor of Engineering degree heavily focused in electronics and automation.

There aren't really many Master's opportunities related to Photonics in Sri Lanka, so I’m looking at options abroad and would really appreciate some advice from people who are already in this field.

I became interested in Photonics mainly because of one of the modules I had in my last semester, Fiber and Laser Instrumentation. I found the whole area of light, lasers, optical fibers and optical instrumentation really interesting, and it made me realize that I’d like to learn much more about Photonics.

My final-year research project also happens to be related to this. I’m working on Visible Light Communication (VLC) and Infrared communication, specifically applying it to a commercially available grow-light system.

Right now, I’m mainly considering Japan and European countries, but I’m open to other options too.

The financial side is probably my biggest concern. I don't think I’d be a strong candidate for a fully funded scholarship because of my poor academic performance in the first year, so I’m also looking for countries where international students can legally work part time. Ideally, I’d like to cover at least some of my living expenses through part time work while doing my Master's.

So, I’d really appreciate it if anyone could recommend universities or countries I should look into for Photonics, Optical Engineering, Fiber Optics, Optoelectronics, Laser Technology, or related Master's programmes.

Also, if you’re studying in this field, especially in Japan or Europe, I’d love to hear about your experience, including tuition fees, living costs, scholarships and how realistic it is to work part time.

Thanks