Research from Siegen Published in *Optica*
Just a few months after successfully completing his doctoral degree at the University of Siegen, Dr. Amr Farrag has achieved another scientific milestone: His manuscript, “Sub-nanojoule ultrafast optical Kerr gating at 1 GHz repetition rates using multilayer graphene and thin graphite films,” has been accepted for publication by the journal *Optica *.
The journal is one of the leading international journals in the fields of optics and photonics. Publication follows a rigorous peer-review process, making this a special recognition of the quality and relevance of Farrag’s research.
Farrag’s research focuses on how to measure extremely fast optical processes at the nanoscale. This is relevant, among other things, for future applications in quantum photonics, such as particularly bright single-photon sources.
Such light sources could, for example, play an important role in quantum communication and quantum information processing. To excite them particularly quickly, modern lasers can generate billions of light pulses per second. However, the resulting light signals are so short that conventional measurement methods cannot resolve them with sufficient temporal resolution.
This is where Farrag’s research comes in. He developed an optical Kerr gate based on graphene—an ultrathin material with extremely strong optical nonlinearity—which, simply put, functions like a very fast light switch. It opens for only a tiny fraction of a trillionth of a second, thereby enabling the precise analysis of ultrashort light signals. What makes Farrag’s approach unique is the combination of high speed, extreme temporal resolution, and very low energy requirements, which enables previously impossible investigations of ultrafast processes at the nanoscale.
Dr. Amr Farrag studied nuclear and radiation engineering at the University of Alexandria in Egypt. He then earned a Master of Science in Optics and Photonics from the University of Eastern Finland (Finland) before moving to the University of Siegen as a doctoral student.
Link to the original publication: https://opg.optica.org/optica/fulltext.cfm?uri=optica-13-9-1927
