Projects in progress

Project Alpine – FP7 – European Commission: CORDIS

Vision and Aim

Photovoltaic solar energy conversion is increasingly recognized as the key component of renewable energy source for the future. Developing cheap and efficient photovoltaic devices for very large scale applications is thus a mandatory challenge. Presently, silicon based technologies are highly dominant in supplying the growing PV demand, whilst new thin film technologies based on cadmium telluride (CdTe) and copper indium diselenide (CIS) or copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS) materials are starting to deliver at the industrial level. With a potential conversion efficiency just below that of crystalline silicon PV, low-cost manufacturing strategies are needed to receive the level of market uptake required to have immediate economic or environment impact. From recent scientific developments, new production technologies can be anticipated to make more cost-effective devices and thus accelerate the uptake of PV. In this sense, a new generation of lasers, based on optical fibers, has recently appeared on the market bringing serious and deep advantages over previous technologies. Among these lasers, high power sources are mainly based on doped conventional silica or phosphate glass fibers, whose usage is still a limiting factor for building high energy, single-mode fiber lasers. In the meanwhile, medical, microelectronics, machining and micro-machining markets are driving research toward highly reliable, short wavelength, high repetition rate, narrow linewidth pulsed lasers with programmable parameters, such as pulse width, shape and energy.

These innovative laser systems will be developed in this project by using photonic crystal fibers (PCFs), a new class of optical fibers, also called microstructured optical fibers or holey fibers, in which the cladding is formed by a distribution of air-holes in a matrix of dielectric material, usually silica, running along the entire fiber length. These fibers are characterized by unusual and interesting light guiding properties, which are strongly related to the air-hole relative position, size and shape, and can be exploited in a wide range of applications, as in telecommunication systems, spectroscopy, microscopy, filtering, and sensing. PCF have also gained significant interest in the recent years due to their ability to deliver high power with excellent beam quality. In fact, PCFs can be made with high numerical aperture, large mode field diameter, all silica double cladding, which allows the fiber to be very robust towards high optical pump and high temperature, and present high threshold for nonlinearities. The laser design based on PCFs can thus bring important and crucial advantages with respect to standard fiber lasers in terms of brilliance of the source, ruggedness of the resonator, stability of the oscillating mode and efficiency. For these reasons, and for the unsurpassed design flexibility, PCF technology can be exploited in many fields and is exploited by the ALPINE consortium for the laser development.

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