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Photonics Research and Development Perspectives in Poland An insight into the world of photonics in Poland Photonics is one of the most promising and fastest developing innovative technologies and a key-enabling technology of Europe. Poland has a long tradition in optics and photonics research, especially in laser-based and optical fiber technologies. This article will describe current research activities in the field of photonics as well as presenting selected development perspectives occurring in this area in recent years in Poland.

Photonics – a technology of key importance for the high-tech industry development Photonics, incorporated in 2011 by the European Commission into five key enabling technologies (KETs), is one of the most promising and fastest developing innovative technologies, the development of which will be a decisive factor for the future of the European industry on the global market. In the nearest decade, photonics shall constitute one of the priority fields for research and development within the European Union. The field comprises such problems as optical data processing, optical telecommunications, imaging, lighting, photonic displays, production process control, health and natural environment protection, photonic safety and security systems. In many of those applications photonics offers cutting edge and exclusive solutions which is especially true for situations where traditional techniques and technologies have reached a dead end with respect to both the speed of their operation and accuracy.

Photonics research in Poland Photonics research in Poland is largely concentrated around academia (over 70% of the research potential) including universities of technology and Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN) units with its small share in research companies and institutes – see Figure 1. In Western Europe the proportions are quite the opposite, while in the USA

The Authors Tomasz R. Wolin´ski

Andrzej W. ´ ski Doman

Tomasz R. Woliński, PhD in Physics (1985), DSc in Physics-Optics (1995), Professor of Physics (2002); Optics and Photonics Division Head, Faculty of Physics, Warsaw Univ. of Technology; 300 papers, 7 patents (U.S., Canada, Poland); 4 review chapters (Progress in Optics, Enc. of Opt. Eng., Wiley, Springer); Photonics Society of Poland President (2008); SPIE Fellow (2004); OSA, IEEE member; Photonics Letters of Poland publisher; FNP “Mistrz” Laureate in Photonic Liquid Crystals Fibers (2010-2012).

Andrzej W. Domański, PhD (1975), DSc (2005), Professor (2007), Optoelectronic Lab. Head, Faculty of Physics, Warsaw Univ. of Technology; Treasurer and Photonics Society of Poland Board member; more than 300 papers and 15 patents (U.S., Canada, Poland) in optical fiber photonics, polarization, liquid crystal optics, and polarimetric optical tomography; SPIE Fellow (2004); Founder of the Sensomed Co. (1990): optoelectronic equipment for oncology hospitals, industrial, and university laboratories. ●●

Faculty of Physics Warsaw University of Technology and Photonics Society of Poland Koszykowa 75, 00-662 Warszawa, Poland E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

only 15% researchers are university employees. The works carried out by universities in the field of photonics are connected primarily with Ph.D. and habilitation (DSc) dissertations. Consequently, the subject matter can be implemented without an expensive technological background, related primarily to photonic devices and metrological instruments. The university-centered location of research teams results in serious break-up of subject matters and unwillingness to create consortiums composed of the university and a company which would bring significant benefits, as seen by the favorable example of VIGO S.A. and the Military University of Technology (MUT). Warsaw and the Mazovian capital region have the most significant share in Polish photonics research and market, which exceeds 60 per cent. Since 2008, the O PTOKLASTER has been gathering more than 20 photon-

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ics manufacturing companies and research institutions agglomerated in Warsaw and in the capital region. The core competencies of the companies belonging to the OPTOKLASTER are in the areas of optical and optoelectronic elements, semiconductor lasers, laser apparatus’ for the medical sector, as well as laser equipment for industry. In turn, the research institutes support the companies with designing, manufacturing and researching new sources of laser radiation, detectors and new materials for the use in optoelectronics. Another dynamic and active photonics area in Poland is located in Wrocław and in Lower Silesia where more than 30 entities are involved in research and production in the area of photonics. Also Upper Silesia (Gliwice), Kraków, Poznan, Gdansk, and Lublin belong to the significant centers of photonics in Poland, in which both

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Market Report

FIG. 1: Distribution of Polish research teams dealing with photonics [1].

research and development activities mostly at universities of technology are undertaken. Examples of other dynamic photonics companies in Poland include, but are not limited to: SOLARIS LASERS and SOLARIS OPTICS (Warsaw), Laser Instruments (Warsaw), SMARTTECH (Warsaw), SENSOMED (Warsaw), SEMICON (Warsaw), LASER-TEX (Wrocław), MEDOCOM (Zabrze). In recent years there have been several Polish photonic products that have reached a global level and commercial success worldwide. The outstanding examples of these products are: • Infrared detectors (Figure 2) manufactured by VIGO SYSTEM S.A. and developed in MUT, Warsaw (Professors Józef Piotrowski and Antoni Rogalski); • Optical coherence tomograph for ophthalmic diagnostics manufactured by OPTOPOL sold to Canon and developed in Nicolaus Copernicus Univ. in Torun´ (Professor Andrzej Kowalczyk); • Gallium Nitride (GaN) monocrystals of the highest quality manufactured by AMMONO (Dr. Robert Dwiliński) that is the world leader in truly bulk GaN manufacturing (http://spectrum.ieee. org/semiconductors/materials/theworlds-best-gallium-nitride). Each of those products has been manufactured basing on the achievements of academics from Polish universities and usually with their active participation, starting from basic tests, through implementation, to achieving real international marketing success. Scientists at the Institute of Electron Technology (ITE) in Warsaw (Professor Maciej Bugajski) developed the technology of manufacturing Quantum Cascade Lasers (QCLs) with three times the power of existing devices. They attract attention, because they enable the construction of portable detectors of trace amounts of chemicals such


FIG. 2: VIGO S.A. infrared detectors.

as methane in mines or hazardous gases in the chemical industry. They also have promising medical applications. QCLs in detectors help detect the presence of even trace amounts of disease markers in exhaled air. Scientists from ITE developed the production technology and built QCL prototypes with unprecedented power: at room temperature, the pulse power reaches tens of milliwatts and five watts under cryogenic cooling. These values are three times higher than the best results previously achieved for this material composition and design. Also researchers from the Institute of High Pressure Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN), founded in 2001 the Warsaw-based TopGaN Ltd (Mr. Andrzej Kasprowiak); a company that has developed a new generation of nitride laser diodes using innovative fabrication technologies of GaN wafers by High Nitrogen Pressure Solution growth. Besides the commercial global photonic achievements mentioned above, there have been unique technological studies prepared in Poland which have not been commercialized for various reasons. The most important ones include achievements in the field of liquid crystals technology and special optical fibers. Liquid crystals play a key role in imaging photonics at present. Liquid crystal displays (LCDs) with growing diagonals have a significant share in the global photonics market. The team of Professor Roman Dabrowski (MUT) concentrated on the synthesis of various liquid crystals’ types. A significant number of patents for the technologies developed under his supervision have not resulted in foundation of a Polish company which could implement them and obtain fully marketable products. The licenses for those patents were purchased primarily by companies from Japan, South Korea and Taiwan which implemented them in mass produc-

tion, manufacturing semi-finished products which are delivered to numerous assembly plants of displays and TV sets worldwide, including Poland, where the number of those plants is high. Liquid crystals discovered and studied intensely for many years by European teams (Germany, France, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Poland) have been seized for LCD applications by technological corporations from Asia who have dominated the global market in this field. In this case the added value stemming from developing unique technologies has brought about a much smaller effect for the Polish economy (and, generally speaking, for the European one) than it should have. Another similar example are works on the unique special optical fiber technology carried out by a group of researchers led by late Dr. Jan Wójcik from the Maria CurieSkłodowska University (UMCS) in Lublin and continued by his graduates under the supervision of Dr. Paweł Mergo. The optical fiber communication is the basis of contemporary telecommunication but there are also many photonics areas such as sensors for military, medical, industrial and environment protection applications requiring special optical fibers. The micro-structured optical fibers, also called photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) are unique worldwide and are a subject of application studies in photonic laboratories of primarily the Warsaw Univ. of Technology, Wrocław University of Technology, and of the MUT, but also under the academic cooperation principle in the laboratories of Canada, Belgium, France, Singapore, and Hong Kong. The initial attempts at commercial implementation and production of such unique optical fibers have been undertaken not only in UMCS, but also in the Institute of Electronic Materials Technology (ITME) in Warsaw, where multi-component glass PCFs are manufactured.

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FIG. 3: Temperature tuning of light propagation in the photonic crystal fiber (1023 UMCS) filled with the low-birefringence liquid crystal (1550 MUT) [2].

It is worth stressing that one of the Polish specializations, originating in the Faculty of Physics of the Warsaw University of Technology, has become a combination of unique properties of liquid crystals in PCFs’ micro-channels (Figure 3) providing a significant contribution to the development of the new sensor photonics area, namely opto-fluidics. This is a hope for complex microanalysis of gas and liquid composition required for safety purposes, and useful also in medicine and environment protection.

Competitive technological areas Given the existing research achievements of Polish research centers and the potential of manufacturing companies, it can be assumed that the Polish photonic industry could be successfully competitive in the following areas: • Technology of micro- and nano-structured special photonic fibers and optical fiber composite structures; • Solid and liquid crystal technology for photonics; • Technology of highly sensitive photodetectors of new generation for the infrared and terahertz frequencies; The photonic fiber technology has been developing since the time of producing the first fiber of such a type from silica glass in 1996. Thanks to the highest quality of such fibers made of silica glass, to the greatest advancement of their production technology and compatibility with the best optical fibers with a traditional structure, those fibers, though produced on a small scale, have already been used in numerous economic sectors. Photonic optical fibers made of silica glass and of high silica glass manufactured from volatile substrates, despite many un-

questionable advantages over the fibers made of other materials, have certain defects stemming from the construction materials’ properties. These are weak nonlinear properties and limited spectral transmission bandwidth. Both the traditional and photonic optical fibers have been currently made of four basic glass groups, namely silica glass, or more exactly high silica glass, of organic glass, silicate multi-component glass and a group of non-oxide and oxide glass made of heavy elements. The traditional optical fibers with the best quality used in te lecommunications are manufactured on a mass scale solely from silica glass. Also the non-telecommunication fibers made of this material are predominant on the market with respect to their quantity and quality. The economic significance of optical fibers made of other materials is smaller and it decreases in the following order of materials: organic glass, soft silicate glass types, heavy element glass types. In Poland technology has recently been implemented for manufacturing polymer optical fibers (POF) as well as micro-structured (or photonic) polymer optical fibers (mPOF). Another strategic goal is the creation of infrastructure and developing appropriate know-how for the development of the technology to manufacture microstructured optical fibers from organic glass in Poland and to test that infrastructure by developing technologies for several new mPOF types. In the field of solid and liquid crystal technology for photonics there is an immense and growing demand for nitrides (GaN) anticipated which shall be used in light sources and semiconductor power devices which applied among others for trans-

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porting energy over long distances and for the conversion of direct into alternating current in photovoltaics. It is expected that thanks to their properties, the nitrides will replace silicon as further attempts at improving the silicon power devices require their further expansion and increase in size which means growing costs. The success of the Polish technology related to “crystal growth” opens opportunities for obtaining high-quality, homogeneous, not tense GaN layers in the polar and non-polar directions, enabling to grow new quality quantum wells, multiwells and microcavities. It could be reasonably assumed that those works will lead to cutting edge quantum devices, such as microcavities with exciton condensate, construction of polarized light sources, detectors with controlled sensitive range or biological and chemical sensors. In the last 30 years liquid crystals have gained wide applicability as flat, reliable, electro-optical devices for visualizing information. Examples of the most popular products include watches, clocks, calculators, mobile phones, personal electronic notebooks, displays of laptops and desktop computers, TV sets, vehicle and aircraft instruments, etc. Besides this high-volume production dominated by South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and China, there are potential vacant areas for niche applications, in particular related to using liquid crystals for manufacturing various sensors, spatial light modulators, fast optical valves and optical filters, as well as many components required for phase correction and polarization, as well as for processing and controlling optical fiber photonic properties used in telecommunications and metrology which may result in creating new devices. Liquid crystals are an extremely flexible medium which can be controlled by means of electric or magnetic fields, as well as by mechanical, thermal or photonic factors, and their optical properties can easily be changed and modeled by introducing various admixtures, such as nanoparticles, dyes, polymers and chiral compounds. In this way a great number of new materials is obtained with a highly diversified and wide range of physical and optical properties. The primary objective is to create new liquid-crystal materials enabling efficient control and adjustment of light beam parameters. According to the experts, by developing the liquid and solid crystal technology for photonics, VIGO System S.A. is able to manufacture the most sensitive infrared radiation detectors for every wavelength range from 1 to 15μm, which would not require cryogenics, and also optimized lownoise electronic circuits for those detectors,


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both signal amplifiers and Peltier module controllers. Moreover, the company is able to manufacture optical components used for this spectral bandwidth. The subject of that program is to develop quantum cascade laser technology with diverse applications, among other for constructing hypersensitive gas testers. The main contractor for this task is the team from the Institute of Electron Technology (ITE). VIGO System S.A. is a designer and manufacturer of uncooled semi-conductor infrared detectors with a sub-second reaction time unique worldwide which are indispensable for sensor construction basing on QLC lasers. The implementation of this new technology for production in VIGO System S.A., which may boast about development and implementation of many devices recognized and awarded in Poland and abroad, guarantees success of the entire undertaking. In the area of infrared metrology there is also a spin-off company INFRAMET created by Professor Krzysztof Chrzanowski from MUT. The direct transition of solar into electrical energy in photovoltaic cells is one of the more reliable forms of obtaining renewable energy. In Poland we meet all the conditions to start manufacturing such cells, as well as, even more importantly, possessing competent research teams in this area, cooperating actively with foreign teams. It is possible to manufacture both traditional crystal silicon panels and thin-film solar cells which increase their share in the global photovoltaic market rapidly. A special position among the thin-layer technologies is taken by photovoltaic heterojunction structures with the absorber being a semi-conductor belonging to Cu(In,Ga)Se2 (CIGSe) family. At present the CIGSe cell technology has been entering the commercialization phase rapidly: the number of plants manufacturing CIGSe modules or implementing them into mass production has grown to reach several dozens in recent years worldwide. The mass production requires stable, fully controlled manufacturing processes providing repeatable and reliable photovoltaic modules. In the previous decade the potential of 3D imaging was presented for tissue structure in micrometric resolution without infringing tissue structure by means of optical tomography or OCT. The results of scientific research in this field were recognized by ophthalmologists. In reply to the demand of this community, the Polish company called OPTOPOL (Zawiercie), in cooperation with academics (Nicolaus Copernicus University, Torun´) developed a commercial SOCT Copernicus tomograph with an im-


aging speed a hundred times greater than the earlier solutions of Zeiss-Meditec. The commercial success encouraged Cannon to purchase OPTOPOL shares. In production of 3D scanners for a wide range of applications, the company SMARTTECH is a known expert in 3D measurement since the year 2000. ScanBright and scan3D systems produced by SMARTTECH have won many international rewards and gained the name of Polish Product of the Future for their innovations.

Conclusions Poland has reached more than 60% of the average EU GDP per capita. Almost all the reserves related to the political system change have been used. Further GDP growth must take place in sectors with high innovative potential, and photonics is one of them. It is time for strategic governmental actions to reach that goal. It is worth stressing that photonics is characterized with an extremely high rate of return stemming from relatively low investment expenditure for research, thanks to which Poland is likely to reach a leading role in the specified fields, as the rank of research in those fields, carried out by well-organized Polish research teams, and the development dynamics of Polish photonic companies, are recognized worldwide. The university-centered location of research teams results in a serious break-up of subject matters and unwillingness to create consortiums composed of a university and a company which would bring significant benefits, as seen by the favorable example of VIGO SYSTEM S.A. and the Military University of Technology. Photonics research and development perspectives in Poland are very promising due to many highly qualified scientists and researchers mostly affiliated at universities of technology and research institutions. Simultaneously, there has been an evidence of successful worldwide commercialization of innovations transferred from academia to high-tech companies, e.g., MUT-VIGO, Nicolaus Copernicus University – OPTOPOL, Warsaw University and Warsaw University of Technology – AMMONO. A number of outstanding photonics innovations briefly outlined in this paper are still awaiting governmental/EU funding. The National Center for Research and Development (NCBiR) under direction of Professor Krzysztof J. Kurzydłowski has created a new policy in funding innovative projects in Poland; e.g., NCBiR has recently opened GRAFtech program and granted 12 research projects devoted to graphen applications (also in

Info Established in 2007, the Photonics Society of Poland (PSP) transformed from the SPIE Poland Chapter (existing since 1988), with its about 250 members is the largest and the most powerful optics-optoelectronics-photonics organization in Poland. PSP members are mainly from the academia and from governmental institutes; but also from industrial and business communities. PSP aims to integrate national photonics community and to undertake research, technical, organizational, and business endeavors in relations to the industry, international partners, consortia and technological platforms. Since September 2012, PSP has become a partner in the Photonics Optoelectronics Network PHOENIX, a project within the framework of the “Network formation in Central and East Europe” funding program of the State of Berlin. http://photonics.pl/

photonics) based on a new epitaxy method to produce graphen that was elaborated at ITME, Warsaw (Dr. Włodzimierz Strupin´ski). A large number of photonics-oriented research groups in Poland in comparison to a much smaller number of photonics companies opens up possibilities of collaboration in specific areas of photonics with leading EU companies and institutions. High-level education programs in photonics are being offered at several Polish universities of technology. Since October 1, 2012, the Faculty of Physics at the Warsaw University of Technology has opened (for the first time in Poland) a new direction of education “Photonics” and has attracted more than 60 students – future specialists in the field. References [1] A. W. Domański, Z. Jankiewicz, T. R. Woliński, W. L. Woliński: “Current status and research development perspectives of the Polish research institutes and production companies active in the field of optoelectronics and photonics” (in Polish), Electronics and Telecommunications Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences, ed. J. Modelski, Warszawa (2010) pp. 183-224. [2] T. R. Woliński, K. Szaniawska, S. Ertman, P. Lesiak, A. W. Domański, R. Dabrowski, E. Nowinowski-Kruszelnicki, J. Wojcik: “Influence of temperature and electrical fields on propagation properties of photonic liquid-crystal fibers”, (2006) Measurements Science and Technology 17(5) pp. 985-991.

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