Best Student Papers

1^st Place
Tobias Beckerwerth, Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, Germany
“High-Speed Waveguide Integrated Avalanche Photodiode on InP”

We present a waveguide integrated avalanche photodiode for high-speed operation. Its sophisticated structure comprising a fully undepleted absorber and an additional drift-layer, reducing the transit time significantly. The device shows high external responsivity of 0.61 A/W at unity gain for a wavelength of 1550 nm, while the bandwidth is up to 37 GHz at a gain of M=1.5.

2^nd Place
Morgan Turville-Heitz, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
“High-Power Mid-Infrared Quantum Cascade Lasers for Free-Space Communications”

Short-cavity (L=1.5 mm) 1st-order, metal/semiconductor-grating DFB QCLs, emitting at λ~ 4.7 μm, are found to operate to 166mW CW and 1.5 W peak-pulsed powers. Modeling of the device performance has been correlated with experimental findings, showing good agreement with calculated threshold-current densities.

3^rd Place
Naoki Yamaguchi, University of Tokyo, Japan
“Coherent Doppler LiDAR using Novel MEMS-based Optical Phased Array Scanner”

This paper presents the first implementation of a novel MEMS-based optical phased array scanner in Coherent Doppler LiDAR. Through live experiments, simultaneous velocimetry and random-access scanning are demonstrated to an accuracy of 0.65 m/s with 63.4⁰ FOV.

Honorable Mention
Essam Berikaa, McGill University, Canada
“EDFA-Free Net 500 Gbps Transmission over 2 km Using a Thin-Film Lithium Niobate IQM”

We demonstrate the transmission of 124 Gbaud 32QAM (144 Gbaud 16QAM) on a single polarization in the C-band over 2 (10) km without optical amplification under the 2.4×10-2 SD-FEC threshold using a thin-film lithium niobate IQ modulator; representing a net data rate of 515 (480) Gbps

Honorable Mention
Lachlan Goulden, The University of Sydney Nano Institute (Sydney Nano) and Institute of Photonics and Optical Science (IPOS), The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
“On-Chip Quasi-Light Storage for Long Optical Delays”

We demonstrate quasi-light storage based on stimulated Brillouin scattering in a chalcogenide waveguide on a photonic chip. One nanosecond long optical pulses were delayed by up to 500 ns greatly exceeding previous on-chip demonstrations.