Goodbye Zimeng!

Over the summer I had Zimeng Wu, an undergraduate student at UCL, working with me on my photonic chips! I had these chips made some time ago by Cornerstone in Southampton University. They are made from a standard SOI (Silicon-on-Insulator) wafer, which is etched to carve out photonic structures like waveguides, Bragg gratings, and resonators. This was the first time I’d ever designed, received and tested silicon chips! It was so exciting but also so delicate and fiddly.

Zimeng has built a chip-testing rig - she did this with no budget, and utilised unused and discarded equipment lying around the lab! In the photo you can see two stripped optical fibers; one brings light into the chip from a laser, the other collects light from the chip and sends it to a photodetector.

Its really tricky stuff! And Zimeng managed to construct a first iteration rig that move around the input and output fibers in 3 axis each, independently, as well as a microscope setup to view this.

Thank you Zimeng for your help!