Continued success at Photonics West – Felix Wanitschke receives Best Student Presentation Award

An impressive success for Jena laser research: At this year's Photonics West in San Francisco, our doctoral student Felix Wanitschke was honored with the “Fiber Lasers Best Student Presentation Award.” He received first prize in the sub-conference “Fiber Lasers XXIII: Technology and Systems” for his presentation “Experimental investigations on the relative phase stability in amplifying multicore fibers.”

Photonics West is considered one of the world's largest and most important conferences in the field of photonics. Every year, more than 20,000 experts from research and industry meet to present and discuss the latest developments in laser and optical technologies. An award on this stage not only highlights the impressive quality of the presentation, but also the scientific relevance and high international profile of the research work from Jena.

In his work, Felix Wanitschke experimentally investigated the stability of relative phases in multi-core fiber amplifiers—a key prerequisite for stable coherent beam combining (CBC). His results provide the first experimental evidence that ytterbium-doped multi-core fibers can behave like shielded interferometric systems: the relative phases of the individual amplification channels remain remarkably stable even at high output powers.

“I am very grateful to be able to work on such an exciting topic and to present our results in San Francisco. This experience was very special for me,” says Felix Wanitschke, who is part of the Fiber & Waveguide Lasers working group led by Prof. Jens Limpert, a scholarship holder at the Max Planck School of PhotonicsExternal link, and an associate at the Helmholtz Institute JenaExternal link.

The Fiber & Waveguide Lasers group is one of the leading international teams in laser development for many years. Its young scientists regularly impress at Photonics West with outstanding contributions—proof of the consistently excellent research conducted at the Institute of Applied Physics at Friedrich Schiller University Jena.