SPIE Senior Member Vincenzo Spagnolo has been appointed director of the Joint-Research Lab PolySense, created by Thorlabs GmbH and the Technical University of Bari (POLIBA).
Under the agreement, which was signed on the 21st of April 2017, POLIBA will provide laboratory and office space, facilities and research, and coordination of the activities by Prof. Vincenzo Spagnolo, while Thorlabs will provide technical staff, funds to finance fixed-term research and post-doctoral positions, as well as Ph.D. fellowships and the needed instrumentation.
Thorlabs, a vertically integrated photonics products manufacturer, was founded in 1989 to serve the laser and electro-optics research market. As that market has spawned a multitude of technical innovations, Thorlabs has extended its core competencies in an effort to play an ever increasing role serving the Photonics Industry at the research end, as well as the industrial, life science, medical, and defense segments. The organization’s highly integrated and diverse manufacturing assets include semiconductor fabrication of laser diodes, optical amplifiers, lithium niobate modulators, quantum cascade/interband cascade lasers, and VCSEL lasers; fiber towers for drawing glass optical fibers (silica, fluoride, tellurite, and hollow core); MBE/MOCVD epitaxial wafer growth reactors; extensive glass and metal fabrication facilities; advanced thin film deposition capabilities; and optomechanical and optoelectronic shops.
Spagnolo is an expert in optical gas sensing, exploiting the quartz-enhanced photoacoustic (QEPAS) technique. His research group holds the record detection limit for QEPAS and provided the first demonstration of mid-IR fiber-coupled QEPAS sensors, QEPAS sensing in the THz spectral range, and intracavity-QEPAS. It also developed custom quartz tuning forks (QTFs) with enhanced sensing performance and recently reported the first exploitation of QTF overtone flexural modes for QEPAS. By simultaneously exciting the QTF fundamental and first overtone modes, the Spagnolo group demonstrated the possibility to perform simultaneous dual-gas detection with a QEPAS sensor.
Leveraging this background, the PolySense Lab will focus its activity on the further development and implementation of novel gas sensing techniques and the realization of highly sensitive QEPAS trace-gas sensors. They seek to provide portable solutions for in situ & real time detection applications such as breath analysis, environmental monitoring, leaks detection, hydrocarbon gas sensing, and monitoring of hotspot areas (such as toxic gases and explosive precursors). PolySense Lab will also perform sensing on demand and provide third-party consulting.