Photonics and instrumentation

Integrated photonic components and optical measurement instruments — the engineering strand that produces the measurement tools for the three application areas.

The problem

Every spectroscopic diagnosis is bounded above by the quality of the instrument that produced the spectrum. Commercial Raman probes are expensive, closed and offer no access to the optical path, which makes them hard to tailor to specific biological or agricultural sample types. One layer deeper, multi-channel measurement systems need phase shifters and mode converters that are simultaneously broadband, compact and manufacturable on silicon to keep costs down.

How we solve it

The group works at two layers. Component layer: numerical design and optimisation of integrated photonic structures on silicon-on-insulator — waveguides, ITO-based controllable phase shifters, mode-selective converters — to reach broad bandwidth in a very small footprint. Instrument layer: assembling components and sensors into probes, using lasers in clinical intervention, then coupling them to signal processing and machine-learning models running at the edge.

Component-layer results are currently designs and numerical simulations. Every performance figure holds only under the published simulation conditions, until fabricated samples and independent measurements exist.

Results so far

The figures below cover only the 2 publications in this research area that appear in the BIRALAB catalogue, using the same method applied to every area.

Publications in catalogue: 2
Time span: 2019–2021
Citations: 20
Co-author countries: 2

Most cited

Reduced Need of Infiltration Anesthesia Accompanied With Other Positive Outcomes in Diode Laser Application for Frenectomy in Children

2019 · 20 citations

Citation counts and co-author countries come from OpenAlex, updated 9 August 2026; 2 of 2 publications were matched.

These are catalogue figures, not performance measurements of any particular system. A publication may be assigned to more than one area, so the areas add up to more than the number of records in the catalogue. An h-index per area is deliberately not shown: the measure only means something for a closed set, and computing it on a subset yields a number that is lower than reality and easy to misread.

View statistics for the whole catalogue →

Case study

The first case study is being prepared with a partner organisation. It will be published once all parties agree and, where human data is involved, once ethics approval is in place.