The Many Beacon

Developing a fundamental understanding of light scattering from quantum matter is the subject of the second flagship project. It intends to improve our understanding of the physical world, providing a new window into the physics of phase transitions, such as when a liquid becomes a gas. This project uses University of Otago’s ultracold atom machine to cool Bose-Enstein Condensates which are predicted to quantum mechanically enhance the rate at which light is dispersed.

The Many Beacon’s first flagship project will explore and harness a recently discovered ultrashort pulse generation scheme. It’s an exciting development amid an increasing drive for precision spectroscopy and laser micromachining. DWC researchers have produced “Raman solitons” with durations well below 100 femtoseconds. These are the shortest-ever pulses generated in resonators (active or passive) made from a single commercially available optical fibre and could potentially be transferred into a chip-scale format.