“Center of Excellence in Photonics”: Three million euros for new research collaborations offering applications in medicine and life sciences

With nearly three million euros in funding, the “Center of Excellence in Photonics” as Jena’s innovation platform continues to expand its research. 1.5 million euros of this comes from the Free State of Thuringia. The grants will be used to initiate new research collaborations, especially in imaging for life sciences and medicine. A particular focus is on technologies operating in the spectral range of EUV radiation and beyond.

Since 2016, the “Center of Excellence in Photonics” has taken up the challenge of developing innovative solutions with light for important future fields and promoting their implementation and application in science, industry and society. The center of excellence combines applied research with scientifically outstanding basic research on the control of light – ranging from its generation and manipulation to its application.

Free State of Thuringia funds new research collaborations with 1.5 million

Since its launch, the Free State of Thuringia has supported the center as a relevant innovation and transfer platform at the optics location Jena. This year, the state is funding the center of excellence and the cooperation between partners with 1.5 million euros. The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is contributing another 1.35 million for projects on efficient research transfer, such as support for optics and photonics startups. The joint funding by the Free State of Thuringia and the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft also enables the center of excellence to focus on promoting young scientists, in particular by supporting doctoral projects and supplementing them with innovative future topics within the framework of the “Fraunhofer Graduate Research School of Applied Photonics”.

New research collaborations for applications in life sciences

The state’s grant will be used in particular for research collaborations between the partners involved in the center: The focus is on the so-called “Joint Imaging Labs”. The goal is to pool the expertise of the partners with regard to innovative and high-performance imaging technologies. Applications are planned especially in the fields of life sciences and medicine.

Here, the Helmholtz Institute Jena will contribute to the “Joint EUV-XUV Technology Lab”, where the development of a new type of imaging at the boundary between extreme ultraviolet light and the soft X-ray range is to be driven forward. In contrast to the established method of electron microscopy, which can only characterize tissue samples on the surface, the latest EUV technologies enable non-destructive imaging on a larger scale. In recent years, the Helmholtz Institute Jena has been able to realize the world’s most powerful microscopy systems in the EUV range. Record resolutions in the range of less than 50 nanometers could be demonstrated as well as fast measurements on large areas. Simultaneously, the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering IOF developed the world’s most powerful femtosecond laser at a wavelength of two micrometers as part of the Fraunhofer CAPS cluster. This enables an efficient generation of secondary radiation in the soft X-ray range. The goal of the “Joint EUV-XUV Technology Lab” is to develop a worldwide unique high-power source in the soft X-ray range on the basis of this comprehensive know-how and to make it usable for scientific and industrial tasks with adapted imaging processes.

The complete press release of the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering IOF can be found here.

SPARC PhD Award goes to Robert Klas

Robert Klas of Helmholtz Institute Jena has received this year’s PhD Award of the SPARC Collaboration. The SPARC PhD Award 2021 was presented online during the 18th workshop of the collaboration in September. The award was given in recognition of Klas’s PhD thesis “Efficiency Scaling of High Harmonic Generation using Ultrashort Fiber Lasers”.

The work addresses high-power laser-driven sources in the XUV range as an alternative to large-scale light sources such as synchrotrons or free-electron lasers (FEL). These can be obtained, as Klas has shown, by high harmonic generation (HHG) of high average power ultrafast fiber lasers. Such laser-like XUV sources, which are less complex and more accessible to the user, nowadays find applications in lensless imaging or time-resolved spectroscopy. In particular, they can be combined with the storage ring facilities at GSI and FAIR for precision spectroscopy. This combination will enable unique research beyond today’s state of the art.

In this context, a proof-of-principle experiment targeting XUV photoionization of carbon ions based on a laser-driven table-top XUV source has been proposed, granted beam time, and conducted by the SPARC collaboration at CRYRING in 2019 and 2021. Klas provided groundbreakting contributions during his doctoral studies to enable XUV laser spectroscopy at heavy ion storage rings for the first time. The work was carried out at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering in Jena, and the Helmholtz Institute Jena.

The SPARC PhD Award has been presented annually since 2018 and comes with a prize money of 200 euros. The award honors the best PhD thesis within the collaboration concerning atomic physics with heavy ions at the research facilities of GSI and FAIR. SPARC stands for Stored Particles Atomic Physics Research Collaboration. Currently, more than 400 members from 26 countries belong to the collaboration. They are experimenting with the existing atomic physics facilities at GSI and preparing new experiments and setups at the future FAIR accelerator. (CP/GSI)

The complete press release of GSI can be found here.