People

FRANZETTE PAZ BUCLATIN

PhD Student with a National FPI Grant since 2021, under Dr. A. Ródenas & Dr. L. Martin supervision.

OMAR ENRIQUE DE VARONA ORTEGA

Junior Postdoc

Juan de la Cierva Formación grant

Omar de Varona obtained his degree in telecommunications engineering from Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in 2011 and completed the master program in telecommunications engineering by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in 2014, including a 5 months visit to the Research Group of Information Engineering of the University of Florence to complete his master thesis. In 2015, he joined the Laser Development Department at Laser Zentrum Hannover (LZH) to carry out research activities funded by the European Commission under the FP7-MCA-ITN programme “GraWIToN”. In 2019, de Varona obtained a PhD in Laser Physics by the University of Hannover with thesis title “Fiber Amplifiers at 1.5μm for Laser Sources in Next-Generation Gravitational Wave Detectors (GWD)” receiving the qualification of Magna Cum Laude. Since 2015, Dr. de Varona has conducted research and development of single-frequency fiber lasers for the next generation of GWD. Among other achievements in his field, he demonstrated in 2017 the first single-frequency Er3+:Yb3+ fiber laser over 100W with polarized TEM00 emission, which is currently considered a reference for the laser design for future GWDs at 1.5μm (i.e. Einstein Telescope and LIGO Voyager). As member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, he has participated in meetings and workshops towards the design of the nextgeneration GWDs as a laser expert. During 2017, de Varona was a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics within a close collaboration between MPI and LZH. Furthermore, he has proactively established or reinforced international collaboration between his host institution (LZH) and industrial partners such as iXblue(FR), FiberCore(UK), nLight(US) and FiberBridge(GE). Between 2018 and 2021, Dr. de Varona co-directed and participated in projects aimed at the study and development of lasers for hostile conditions (e.g., extreme temperatures, radioactive environments, vacuum, etc.), which has sparked his interest towards the investifation of new photonic architectures intended to intrinsically operate in such environments. In 2021, Omar de Varona joined the Physics Department at the Universidad de La Laguna within the frame of a Juan de La Cierva contract to work on the development of new phonotic systems using 3D-written nanolithography, among other related topics. Omar de Varona has combined his scientific activity with the supervision of students and cosupervision of PhD and Master theses, as well as conducting laboratory sessions and lectures for master and graduate courses.

LEOPOLDO MARTÍN RODRÍGUEZ

Senior Researcher

Associated Professor (Profesor Ayudante Doctor)

He completed his bachelor degree “Licenciatura” in physics in 2009 at La Laguna University ULL (Spain) and obtained PhD in 2013 from the same university. The PhD thesis entitled: “Optical microresonators made out of rare earth doped glasses for optical applications” obtained the PhD Award with Special Distinction “Premio extraordinario de doctorado”. Visiting PhD student at Universitat de Barcelona (11) and University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (12 and 13) at the CUOS center, whose former director Gèrard Mourou, obtained the 2018 Nobel in Physics. In Michigan, Leopoldo worked with professor Tal Carmon and his students and familiarized himself with fiber taper manufacture and microsphere type optical micro resonators coupling setups and optical trapping and levitation experiments. From Nov 13 up to Jul 16 he has held a position as Postdoctoral Fellow at the Technion- Israel Institute of Technology, following Prof. Tal Carmon´s move from Michigan to Israel. Starting a new Optomechanics Lab and conducting research in solid state and liquid optical micro resonators and co-advising a team of 6 students and helping to set-up the optomechanics laboratory. A research milestone was the first optical excitation and detection of a “Ripplon Laser” (Nature Photonics 2016) among other phenomena unique to liquid walled microresonators. From Jul 16 up to May 17, Postdoctoral position as “Lasercomb Scientist” in charge of an optical frequency astrocomb (joint project by “Fundacion Galileo Galilei” and “Harvard University”) for high precision astronomical spectroscopy. This calibration is used at the TNG HARPS-N spectrograph for exoplanet searching, located in Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory (Spain). Between May 17 and June 18, postdoctoral researcher at the Valencia Nanophotonics Technology Center, working on silicon nanobeams structured as optomechanical crystals within the European Project “Phenomen” dealing with phononic structure engineering and successfully building a coupling setup using tapered fiber loops as a key milestone for the NTC nanobeams characterization and all optical phononic excitation/detection system. Personal webpage: https://lmartin.webs.ull.es/

AIRÁN RÓDENAS SEGUÍ

Principal Investigator

Ramón y Cajal Tenure-Track Professor

Dr. Airán Ródenas Seguí is a “Ramón y Cajal” Fellow (awarded 2018); previously has been European Union Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellow (awarded 2016), and a Spanish Government Education and Science MEC Postdoctoral Fellow (awarded 2010). Dr. Ródenas is the discoverer of the technology for laser nanostructuring crystals in 3D, which allows to envisage a future generation of nano-engineered crystals (NECs) with properties beyond those of natural crystals. As a Ramón y Cajal tenure-track professor he now leads the LeapLab (Light-Matter interactions and Extreme-Applications Photonics Lab) at the Physics Department of the Universidad de La Laguna (ULL), which has now a PhD student and a postdoctoral fellow both with competitive national and international project fellowships, and is member of the IUdEA institute of the ULL (Institute of Advanced Studies on Atomic and Molecular Physics and Photonics). Since May 2019 Dr. Ródenas is active recipient of a Ramón y Cajal Fellowship and tenure-track professorship at the ULL (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain). From May 2017 to 2019 he was a European Union Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellow. Previously, he worked first as postdoctoral researcher at UK Heriot Watt University (Edinburgh, UK) for two and a half years with his own Spanish Government Postdoctoral Fellowship, on the development of the first 3D mid-infrared on-chip waveguide beam-combiners for stellar interferometry and Astrophotonics, as well as on the fabrication of 3D photonic crystals. Afterwards, in September 2012 he joined the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV, Spain) for a period of 4 years working as associate professor and researcher, and joining a EU Collaborative FP7 project (www.jediace.net) as lead scientist in charge of developing novel photonic sensors from first concept to industrial environment testing. He has co-directed 3 PhD theses -Dr. J.Martínez (April’17), Dr. H-D Nguyen (Sept’17) and Dr. M. Medina (Nov’19)- and is co-directing one now at the ULL (F.P.Buclatin). He imparted Degree and Master courses at the Universitat Rovira I Virgili in three different subjects from 2013 to 2015, and also lectured as assistant at Heriot Watt University (UK) in 2011. He lectures at ULL since 2019, both in the Physics degree and within the Civil Engineering degree. The multidisciplinary work of Airán Ródenas in the field of 3D engineered photonics and 3D laser nanoprocessing has led to the publication of over 70 papers in high impact journals as Nature Photonics, with an h-index of 23 (Google Scholar). He has 7 invited talks in international conferences, and over 17 oral presentations in international conferences and seminars. He has worked as evaluator for the ERC European Research Council, works as expert evaluator member within the Spanish State Research Agency (Agencia Estatal de Investigación, AEI), and has also reviewed projects for the argentinian ANPCyT state agency, and for the Polish government. He is frequent reviewer of various international photonics and applied physics journals [Light and Scientific Reports (Nature Publishing Group), Applied Optics, Sensors & Actuators, Optics Letters, Optics Express, Optical Materials Express, Chemical Physics Letters, Applied Physics Letters and others]. He is the inventor and co-author of 1 patent for anti-icing aircraft automated systems. A. Ródenas maintains collaboration with around 20 groups from 11 countries (Italy, France, Germany, Japan, UK, Canada, Australia, China, Brazil, Argentina and Spain), 15 of these collaborations being done independently after his PhD period proving his independence. He maintains industrial collaborations in the fields of air transport (Dassault, Fuji Heavy Industries), photonics (Resolution Spectra, Optoscribe) and laser fabrication (LightFAB). He has performed 7 visiting research stays, and has the experience of working as part of 8 different groups in 6 different countries. Current website: https://extremelightblog.com/ Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=zFQ49jAAAAAJ