What is on the Horizon for Future Photonics Research?

The PLG posed the question of “What is on the Horizon for Future Photonics Research” to twenty-five of the UK’s leading photonics academics to generate a picture of where photonics research will be be focused in ten years time. The raw output of that workshop is captured in the summary of seventy topics identified as offering significant potential for future investigation.

Future Photonics Research Horizons

Our examination of the future aims to provide a vision for future photonics research possibilities. This horizon scan is the first step of a three stage process and will be followed by assessing the fit with policy grand challenges and industry interest. The concepts articulated cover a diverse range from new, just emerging, research topics to familiar research areas offering further breakthroughs. The wide range is testimony to the variety of photonics, how much is still to be discovered and the ability of further breakthroughs to have major impact on our future across a vast number of applications.

Conceived against a backdrop of growing UK R&D investment to 2.4% of GDP, the horizon scanning exercise has been a realised under the global coronavirus pandemic. The photonics research community has commendable overcome these hurdles to develop a vision looking beyond the immediate challenges to outline a vision for photonics research in 2030.

The outputs of the horizon scan and relevance to the global grand challenges for photonics will be published in a full report in the summer of 2020.

Please complete our short survey of the impact of Coronavirus restrictions on photonics organisations

2 comments

  1. Gary Weiner - Reply

    Quantum entanglement and quantum key distribution are far from fail safe ways to secure data transmissions and certainly not even remotely close to being deployed beyond hero experiments so why not seek new ways to secure the exponentially increasingly valuable transmission data now including electronic digital currency, electronic health and medical records, bank account informations being distributed across optical fibers that can be too easily eavesdropped on.

    Time to put the wood behind the arrow and look at Spatial Division Multiplexing, a practical and deployable solution today with some modest developmental engineering of known, quantified, qualified technology in the market.

    Physically secure optical fiber transmission.

  2. Pingback: UK Research and Development Roadmap is welcomed by the PLG – UK Photonics Leadership Group

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