Our group is part of the new European project, ULTRAPURE, funded by the EIC Pathfinder programme.

In this project, we will focus on developing ultra-low noise laser sources, which are critical for precise atomic clocks, next-generation communication networks, and quantum technologies.

Over the next three years, we will work with our partners: TU Braunschweig, Thales Research & Technology, University of Rennes, CSEM, and Modus Research.

Congratulations, David and the entire team!

We are excited to announce that our group’s spin-off company, Sabratha, officially launched last week!

The company will focus on developing high-speed modulators and unique optical and RF filters on thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) photonic integrated circuits. This venture marks an exciting step in translating our cutting-edge academic research into commercial products that address the growing demand for high-performance photonics.

We wish the team a successful path ahead!

On November 11th, Steven successfully defended his PhD thesis: ‘Stimulated Brillouin Scattering in Scalable Integrated Photonic Platforms’.

Steven’s contributions to our research have been instrumental. He successfully characterized the SBS response on thin-film lithium niobate and went on to demonstrate the first Brillouin laser on this platform. Furthermore, he expanded the field’s knowledge by providing the world’s first SBS measurements for both silicon oxynitride and thick silicon-on-insulator circuits.

Steven will continue his journey as the CTO of our new spin-off company, Sabratha. Thank you for your incredible work, Steven, and best of luck in this exciting new role!

Gustavo Wiederhecker from the University of Campinas and Maurizio Burla from TU Berlin visited our lab and cleanroom. We had the chance to demonstrate our work on Brillouin scattering and microwave photonics, and enjoyed fruitful discussions.

We were very happy to hear their valuable insights!

On October 21st, Yvan successfully defended his PhD thesis: ‘Brillouin- and Kerr-mediated parametric light sources in scalable photonic platforms’.

During his PhD in the NLNP, Yvan made an extraordinary impact on the group. He demonstrated the first Brillouin laser on the hybrid tellurite/silicon nitride platform. Additionally, he realized both Brillouin lasers and frequency combs on a scalable silicon nitride platform, marking a significant advancement in the field.

Birgit Stiller from Leibniz University Hannover and Thomas Schneider from TU Braunschweig visited our lab. During their visit, we gave them a tour of the MESA+ cleanroom, where we are developing our fabrication processes.

It was great to have very interesting discussions on Brillouin photonics!

We are glad to share that our recent work, ‘Gigahertz thermoelastic acousto-optic modulation in lithium niobate integrated photonic devices’, was published in Nanophotonics.

In this work, we demonstrate thermoelastically driven surface acoustic waves for acousto-optic modulation. Our approach eliminates the need for piezoelectric materials for integrated acousto-optic modulators.

Congrats, Zheng!

On October 3rd, Abel van der Vies successfully defended his thesis: “Scalable Brillouin spectrum engineering in Thin-Film Lithium Niobate”.

Abel addressed a significant challenge in microwave photonics by leveraging the crystalline structure of TFLN waveguides to develop customizable Brillouin filters.

Congratulations and good luck in your future career, Abel!

On October 2nd, Job Noordkamp successfully defended his Master’s thesis: “Integrated Stimulated Brillouin Laser in Foundry Silicon Nitride”.

During his time with the group, Job achieved a major breakthrough by realizing the Brillouin laser and comb on silicon nitride photonic circuits—a long-standing goal of our research. His contributions to the group were remarkable!

We wish you the best of luck with your next steps, Job!

We were delighted to participate in the 2025 MESA+ Meeting, which celebrated the institution’s 25th anniversary. As in previous years, we actively contributed by sharing our most recent scientific results.

The meeting featured several key contributions from our group: Yvan delivered a compelling talk focusing on Brillouin microwave photonic filters for security applications. Furthermore, during the poster session, Steven and Kees presented our recent work and roadmap on scalable TFLN photonics technologies, and Randy demonstrated Brillouin amplifiers and lasers in silicon nitride photonics.

We are extremely proud that, in the poster competition, Randy won the ‘Best Poster’ prize among nearly 70 attendees. Congratulations, Randy, on this outstanding achievement!

We are happy to share our recent work in Laser & Photonics Reviews: ‘Integrated RF Photonic Front-End Capable of Simultaneous Cascaded Functions’ .

In this study, we demonstrate a compact photonic architecture that handles multiple RF processing tasks simultaneously, paving the way for more efficient and compact RF photonic systems.

Congrats, Steven and the team!

We are pleased to announce that our study, ‘Integrated Brillouin photonics in thin-film lithium niobate,’ was published in Science Advances in April.

In this paper, we demonstrate strong stimulated Brillouin scattering on the thin-film lithium niobate platform. As proof-of-concept demonstrations, we realized net-gain Brillouin amplifiers, generated a stimulated Brillouin laser, and devised a multifunctional Brillouin-based MWP processor, all within the standard TFLN platform.

Congratulations, Steven and the team!

We kicked off the year with a full day of roadmapping.

We shared a lot of ideas about new experiments for the following year.

Beside science and tech, we also discussed potential commercialization plans, joined by Dr. Lennart de Vreede from the Strategic Business Development & MESA+, University of Twente.

Tarik presented our recent exciting progress on silicon nitride waveguide fabrication at the MinacNed conference in Eindhoven. This is a team effort from Tarik, Akshay, and technicians from MESA+ Nanolab. Congrats, guys!

After a long period of study, Maarten Eijkel successfully defended his Master’s thesis titled “Integrated microwave photonic technique for RF interference mitigation”, on September 30th.

In his defense, the whole group suited up to bang the drum for Maarten. Congrats, Maarten!

This week, we attended the 2024 European Conference on Integrated Optics in Aachen, Germany. We got the opportunity to present and discuss the latest progress happening in our group with four oral and three poster presentations.

• Shangqing presented a simultaneous Notch Filtering and True Time Delay RF Photonic Front-end on the Si3N4 platform.
• Maarten demonstrated an RF photonic self-interference cancellation system, also on the Si3N4​ platform.
• Chuangchuang showcased a Microwave Photonic (MWP) Notch Filter using Thin-Film Lithium Niobate (TFLN).
• Zheng presented work on thermoelastic acousto-optic modulation in TFLN.
• Steven discussed Brillouin-based applications in TFLN.
• Yvan provided insights into SBS characterizations and Brillouin-based applications in tellurite-covered Si3​N4.
• Akhil demonstrated an SBS-based MWP notch filter in tellurite-covered Si3​N4.

Congrats all for these beautiful results!

We welcome Dharma Prasetya Permana to join our group as an intern for the next few months.

Dharma obtained his BSc in Physics from Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), Indonesia in 2023. Before he starts his Erasmus Mundus Joint Master EuroPhotonics program in September 2024, he will work with Yvan on the four-wave mixing experiments in our group.

Good luck, Dharma! Hope you will enjoy your time here!

On March 25th, Roel successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis titled “Stimulated Brillouin scattering in silicon nitride based waveguides”.

Roel’s contributions to research in our group over the past few years have been remarkable. He unlocked the first on-chip stimulated Brillouin scattering signal in our group. Additionally, he advanced the SBS signal by employing tellurite-covered silicon nitride waveguides. Furthermore, he explored new Brillouin-based applications, i.e. Brillouin dynamic gratings.

Roel will start his new career as the integrated optics system architect at LioniX. Congrats, Roel! And good luck!

Last week, Yvan and Steven attended the 5th International Workshop on OptoMechanics and Brillouin-Mandelstam Scattering (WOMBAT) in Campinas, Brazil.

It is an outstanding workshop with a lot of interesting talks. From our side, Yvan contributed an oral contribution about SBS in the tellurite-covered silicon nitride waveguides. In the meantime, Steven presented a poster about the overview of the SBS characterization activities in the scalable photonic integrated platform.

The first NLNP roadmapping day was successfully held on January 19, 2024. We summarized the research activities in the last year and discussed goals for the near-term and long-term future. It is a truly fun day filled with new ideas and nice food. Thanks, Zheng and Carla for organizing it!

Our group is awarded the prestigious ERC proof of concept grant for the project Veritas. We will receive 150k euros for this project to develop versatile, reconfigurable light sources in photonic integrated circuits. Congrats, the Veritas team!

This news also appears at the University of Twente website.

We are proud to announce that another paper from our group has been accepted at APL Photonics this month, titled “Linearized integrated microwave photonic circuit for filtering and phase shifting”.

Congrats, Gaojian and Steven!

We are pleased that our lastest paper titled “Brillouin and Kerr nonlinearities of a low-index silicon oxynitride platform” has been accepted at APL Photonics, and selected as Editor’s pick.

This is a collaborative work between our group and Prof. Andrea Melloni’s research group from Politecnico di Milano. Congrats to all authors!

Time flies fast. David has worked 12.5 years at the University of Twente since his Ph.D. To celebrate this very Dutch anniversary, he brought some Indonesian snacks this week to the whole group.

Congrats, David! Hope you and we as the whole group can make even bigger achievements in the next 12.5 years.

On January 20th, Redlef Braamhaar defended his MSc thesis titled Polarization pulling in a stimulated Brillouin scattering based microwave photonic filter under the supervision of Yvan and Steven.

After the defense Redlef received a bottle of Whiskey as a gift, which he emptied just an hour later at the celebration party. Congrats Redlef, hope you are not too drunk!

As 2022 draws close to the end, the group organized a potluck dinner this week to celebrate the coming of the Christmas break. We shared Dutch, German, Pakistani, Chinese, and Indonesian food at the party, and all of them are amazingly delicious!

2022 has been a big year for the group. We have gone through ups and downs together (mostly up :-). Merry Christmas and happy new year everyone! Wish all of us can continue the success in 2023!

We are excited to announce that our new paper  Ultrahigh Dynamic Range and Low Noise Figure Programmable Integrated Microwave Photonic Filter has been published in Nature Communications.

In this work, we demonstrate reconfigurable filter functions with record-low noise figure and a RF notch filter with ultra-high dynamic range. We achieve this unique feature using versatile complex spectrum tailoring enabled by an all integrated modulation transformer and a double injection ring resonator as a multi-function optical filtering component. Our work breaks the conventional and fragmented approach of integration, functionality and performance that currently prevents the adoption of integrated MWP systems in real applications.

This publication is another achievement for the group in a fruitful 2022. Congrats Okky, Gaojian and the team for all the heroic efforts!

This post also appears at the front page of the University of Twente.

We are super excited that Okky Daulay earned his Ph.D. Cum Laude on December 14th, 2022.

Okky spends four years in our group and has always been an excellent experimentalist, an ambitious colleague, and a dependable teammate.

Thank you for your dedication, Okky! Congratulations and wish you all the best!

This Tuesday, Prof. Radan Slavik from University of Southampton, United Kingdom gave us a colloquium on Microwave photonics using hollow core optical fibres. Thank you Radan for this impressive talk!

We are excited to announce that our new paper Guided-acoustic stimulated Brillouin scattering in silicon nitride photonic circuits has been published in Science Advances.

In this work, we use the symmetric double-stripe silicon nitride waveguide from LioniX to guide both the photon and phonon, showing the possibility to integrate stimulated Brillouin scattering in large circuits. This breakthrough will potentially be integrated with other emerging technologies such as tunable lasers, frequency combs, and programmable photonic circuits, and giving them a part in the future development of fields ranging from telecommunications to quantum computing.

This publication is a great achievement for Roel, and of course, also for the whole team. Congrats all!

This news also appears at the front page of the  University of Twente website.

Recently, David has been appointed as a full professor of the brand-new chair Nonlinear Nanophotonics (NLNP). From now on, the NLNP will run as an independent research group at the University of Twente.

We are excited that Steven’s paper has been selected for an oral presentation at ECOC 2022, Basel, Switzerland. The paper is titled, “Integrated Microwave Photonic Phase Shifter with Ultrahigh Dynamic Range”.

David has been elected Optica Fellow ’For pioneering contributions to the research and development of integrated microwave photonic devices and systems’.

There’s a nice news item on this article appearing at the University of Twente website. The Optica news release is here.

Gaojian won the best student paper award at the 2021 IEEE Microwave Photonics conference. In his paper he reported world-record high dynamic range for an integrated microwave photonic system. Congratulations Gaojian!  

Recently we received a piece of good news that David was elected as a Fellow of the Optica society (formerly OSA)! David brought cakes and celebrated with the whole group. Congratulations David, we are so proud of you!

We are excited that four papers in our group have been accepted for oral presentations at MWP 2021, Italy. They are:

• Mo2.3 – Silicon nitride integrated mode-locked laser with widely tunable line spacing by Yvan
• Tu1.4 – Simultaneous Notch Filtering and Linearization in an Integrated Microwave Photonic Circuit by Gaojian
• We4.2 – Reconfigurable Double-Injection Ring Resonator for Integrated Microwave Photonic Signal Processing by Okky
• We4.4 – Stimulated Brillouin Scattering in Multilayer Silicon Nitride Waveguides by Roel

Congratulations all!

David has been awarded the START-UP grant of 800,000 Euros by the science division of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). The START-UP programme is intended for newly appointed faculties working in the field of physics and chemistry.

The 4-year project will focus on new ways of controlling gigahertz phonons using integrated photonics. There will be several open PhD and postdoc positions in this project, so if you’re interested please contact David.

The official announcement of the grant in at the NWO website can be found in this  link.