Prof. Luc Thévenaz
Professor, Head of the EPFL Group for Fibre Optics, Member of the Swiss Academy of Science
Biography
Luc Thévenaz received the M.Sc. degree and the Ph.D. degree in physics from the University of Geneva, Switzerland. In 1988 he joined the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne (EPFL) where he currently leads a research group involved in photonics, namely fibre optics and optical sensing. Research topics include fibre sensors, slow & fast light, nonlinear fibre optics and laser spectroscopy in gases. His expertise covers all applications of stimulated Brillouin scattering in optical fibres and he is known for his innovative concepts related to distributed fibre sensing pushing beyond barriers.
During his career he joined Stanford University as a postdoctoral researcher, and later stayed at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), at Tel Aviv University, at the University of Sydney and at the Polytechnic University of Valencia. In 2000 he co-founded the company Omnisens that is developing and commercializing advanced photonic instrumentation based on distributed fibre sensing.
He is member of the Steering Committee of the International Conference on Optical Fibre Sensors and General Chairman of this conference in 2018. He has served in the Technical Committee of several conferences, such as ECOC, CLEO-Europe, APC, etc… and has been Associate Editor of Photonics Technology Letters and the Journal of Lightwave Technology. He is now co-Executive Editor-in-Chief of the journal Nature Light: Science & Applications and is Fellow of the IEEE and OPTICA (OSA), as well as Member of the Swiss Academy of Science.
Topic: “Light amplification and sensing in hollow core fibres”
Abstract
Hollow core fibres are foreseen to be a breaking progress in the transmission of an optical signal by massively reducing the interaction between light and matter and the associated limitations, such as loss, dispersion and nonlinearities. As a direct consequence this absence of interaction also limits the possibilities to process and to impact on a light wave. A solution is to use efficient light interactions in a fluid medium like gases or liquids and this may strikingly outperform interaction strength as observed in solids. Record optical amplification is obtained, paving the way to a novel class of devices, and original sensing concepts are devised and demonstrated.
