Digonnet Group

Research Interests

Our research activities center on the development of advanced fiber sensors with record-breaking resolution and stability, to detect extremely small rotation rates, acoustic pressures, accelerations, temperature changes, or strains. Almost all of our research is applied, in the sense that it aims to develop sensors for practical, near-term applications that will benefit society in multiple areas of science and technology. The focus is generally to implement radically new approaches and principles to push the envelope and produce revolutionary devices. 

A portion of our effort is also targeting the development of rare-earth-doped fiber lasers and amplifiers that are optically cooled by anti-Stokes fluorescence so that they produce or amplify light without the internal generation of heat, unlike all other lasers. This is particularly important to improve the performance of fiber lasers and amplifiers, which have become ubiquitous in many industrial sectors, from the high-speed Internet and telecommunications in general to the automobile industry and advanced metrology. 

Our group's research culture fully embraces the "applied" of Applied Physics. Over the years, our students and postdoctorate affiliates have accumulated more than 150 patents. Of these, 17 have been licensed by Stanford's Office of Technology Licensing. The most successful patent is the fiber-optic amplifier, a now ubiquitous device without which the deployment of the high-speed Internet in the late 1990s and 2000s would not have been possible. Licensed to multiple international telecommunication companies, it was OTL's second largest source of royalties, second to the Google invention. Our inventions also went into the commercial fiber-optic gyroscopes that navigate some commercial airliners—and every single rover on the surface of Mars!