Category: News

Beyond the Lab: How researchers are bridging the gap between technology and practical applications

Posted on by Allison Ng

Beyond the Lab: How researchers are bridging the gap between technology and practical applications

2 June 2026
Allison Ng

When agriculture, food production, and technology are placed side by side, the connection may not seem obvious at first. Yet this intersection highlights a key challenge in research translation – how do we ensure research is translated beyond the lab and into practical application? 

In April, our centre hosted its third Entrepreneurial Training Workshop at the University of Technology Sydney as part of the COMBS Impact and Translation initiative, delivered by Farmers2Founders. Previous workshops were also held in Adelaide and Victoria as part of COMBS’ broader focus on research impact, translation, and industry engagement.

The workshop explored one of the key challenges that many researchers face: bridging the gap between research innovation and real-world application.

Researchers are often highly specialised within their fields, but may have limited exposure to the day-to-day challenges faced by industry or consumers. As a result, identifying where research can create meaningful impact, and how it can be translated beyond the laboratory can be difficult.

Through discussions, collaborative activities, pitching exercises, and mentoring from industry experts, participants were encouraged to shift their thinking from “What technology have we developed?” to “How can this technology help solve a real-world problem?”

While the workshop focused primarily on the agrifood technology sector, it encouraged participants from a wide range of research backgrounds to step outside their usual research perspective and place themselves in real-world industry contexts. This helped researchers think more critically about end-user needs and how their research could address real-world challenges in practice.

Beyond commercialisation, the workshop highlighted the importance of adopting an entrepreneurial mindset to communicate the broader values of research, that in turn strengthen the connection between research and real-world application.

A huge thank you to the Farmers2Founders team for delivering such an insightful workshop. As technologies continue to evolve, programs like the Entrepreneurial Training Workshop play an important role in helping researchers translate innovation into solutions that can ultimately benefit industries, communities, and society as a whole.

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Five surprising things light can do – and how microcombs push it further

Posted on by Allison Ng

Five surprising things light can do – and how microcombs push it further

16 May 2026
Kyla Adams and Rachael Vorwerk

We use light every day. We see with it. We feel it as heat. We use it to send messages, scan our bodies, study the stars and measure time with extraordinary precision. 

But light does much more than help us read signs, take photos or find our way to the fridge at night.

It carries our internet.
It brings us ancient messages from distant planets.
It helps us see earthquakes in real-time.
It keeps time.
It can even reveal what is happening inside the human body.

At our Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Optical Microcombs for Breakthrough Science (COMBS), our researchers are using light in one of its most precise forms: the optical frequency comb.

An optical frequency comb turns one laser into many evenly spaced colours of light. These colours act like the teeth of a comb, creating a precise ruler made from light.

That ruler can be used to measure, transmit and understand the world in new ways.

To celebrate International Day of Light, here are five surprising things light can do – and how our COMBS researchers are using optical microcombs to push them further.

1. The internet travels in optical fibres as light

Every time you scroll, stream, search or send a message, information is racing through optical fibres as pulses of light.

But our internet is growing exponentially at 25% per year – so we need a way to keep up and send more information through the same fibres. One way to do that is to use many colours of light at once, with each colour carrying a different stream of data.

That is where optical microcombs come in.

A microcomb can create many precisely spaced colours from a single laser. Instead of sending information down one lane, it can help create many parallel lanes of light.

Our COMBS researchers and collaborators have already shown how this technology could dramatically increase internet capacity – at the rate of 44 Terabits per second, or the equivalent of sending 1,000 HD movies in a second – through a 76.6 km loop of optical fibre across eastern metropolitan Melbourne.

2. Light can give us clues about planets in other star systems

When you look at the night sky, you are looking into the past.

The light we see from the Sun is about eight minutes old.

The light from Proxima Centauri – the nearest star to Earth after the sun – is more than four years old by the time it reaches us.

Astronomers can study the colour of light to learn about planets orbiting distant stars. Tiny shifts in starlight can reveal whether a star is wobbling because a planet is pulling on it.

But those shifts are incredibly small, and go much further back than just four years (in fact, hundreds of millions of years!). To find them, astronomers need extremely precise tools.

Optical frequency combs can act like rulers for light, helping researchers measure tiny changes in starlight. COMBS researchers are working towards more reliable and compact comb technologies that could support the search for Earth-like planets.

3. Lightning can tell you how far away a storm is

You have probably heard the trick for estimating how far away a storm is: count the seconds between seeing lightning and hearing thunder.

Light travels much faster than sound, so we see the lightning before we hear the thunder. The longer the gap, the further away the storm.

That simple trick uses light and time to estimate distance.

Our COMBS researchers are using the same bigger idea – light as a measurement tool – in much more advanced ways.

By sending laser light through optical fibres and measuring how that light changes, researchers can detect vibrations and environmental changes along the fibre. 

This could help track storms, monitor drainage systems and understand how infrastructure responds during extreme weather.

Our hope is that optical frequency combs could make these measurements even more precise.

4. The best clocks do not tick – they use light

Old clocks used swinging pendulums. Modern phones use electronic signals. The most advanced clocks use atoms and light.

Optical atomic clocks measure the vibrations of atoms using light. These vibrations happen fast and can provide an extraordinarily stable way to measure time.

But there is a challenge: optical atomic clocks operate at frequencies far beyond what everyday electronics can easily count.

Optical frequency combs help bridge that gap. They translate the precision of optical clocks into signals we can use.

Optical clocks are the most accurate way to measure a second, and they’re integral to navigation, communications, space exploration and fundamental science.

5. Light can reveal what the eye cannot see

Using Brillouin microscopy to examine tumour tissue.

For centuries, scientists have used light to reveal hidden information about the world.

It can reveal what materials are made of, how chemicals behave and what is happening inside living tissue.

This is the idea behind spectroscopy – or ‘ghost watching’ as it is in Latin – studying how light interacts with matter.

Our COMBS researchers are exploring how advanced light-based tools could improve biomedical imaging, including research into triple-negative breast cancer cells.

With optical microcombs, researchers hope to speed up some imaging and analysis processes, potentially reducing processing times from hours to seconds.

The future of light is being built on a chip

Light helps us understand the universe, connect with each other, track our environment and measure time.

At COMBS, researchers are developing optical microcombs to make these light-based tools smaller, more robust and more accessible.

These microcombs could make the power of optical frequency combs smaller, more robust and more accessible, helping to turn one of the world’s most precise measurement tools into technology that can be used across industry, science and society.

This International Day of Light, we are celebrating not only what light already does for us, but what it could help us discover next.

Learn more about our research

Adelaide University: Twisted light breakthrough could enable earlier disease detection

Posted on by Zara Falkiner-Rose

Adelaide University: Twisted light breakthrough could enable earlier disease detection

12 May 2026
Adelaide University

This media release was originally posted to the Adelaide University website. Read the full piece here.

 

Researchers from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Optical Microcombs for Breakthrough Science (COMBS) have developed a powerful new way to use light to measure tiny changes in biological fluids such as blood – using samples as small as a millionth of a drop.

The breakthrough, led by teams at Adelaide University, RMIT University and the University of St Andrews (UK), could enable faster and more sensitive medical tests, particularly where only very small sample volumes are available. It could also lead to compact lab-on-a-chip devices capable of analysing tiny biological samples in real-time.

At the heart of the discovery is so-called twisted light – beams that spiral as they travel, just like a corkscrew. This unusual structure gives light a property known as orbital angular momentum, which the researchers measure to probe the physical properties of materials.

This chip combines microscopic spiral phase plates with a simple microfluidic channel. This tiny “plumbing system” lets us carefully move and control minute amounts of liquid - turning delicate lab structures into practical tools for real-world experiments.

This system was successfully tested on sugar solutions and haemoglobin, a key component of blood, demonstrating its ability to analyse biologically relevant samples and its potential for future medical diagnostics.

Scientists have struggled to measure exactly how much this light is twisting, limiting its usefulness in precision sensing.

That barrier has been overcome through the development of a new approach based on analysing speckle patterns, the grainy interference patterns produced when light scatters through material.

By decoding these patterns, they were able to measure the twist of light with up to 1000 times greater precision than existing methods.

“This gives us a completely new level of control,” said Adelaide University’s Aman Punse who is a Higher Degree by Research Candidate in the School of Biological Sciences.

“We can now detect extremely small changes that were previously invisible.”

The researchers then turned this advance into a practical sensing tool. By generating twisted light inside a microscopic fluid channel, they showed that tiny changes in a liquid, such as its composition, alters how the light twists.

“This allowed us to measure the refractive index – a critical property of light – with better than one part per million accuracy, using extremely small sample volumes,” said Senior author and Director of Adelaide University’s Centre for Light for Life, Professor Kishan Dholakia.

The system was successfully tested on sugar solutions and haemoglobin, a key component of blood, demonstrating its ability to analyse biologically relevant samples and its potential for future medical diagnostics.

The results of the tests were published in the journal Nature Communications.

These images taken by a scanning electron microscope reveals a spiral phase plate just 50 microns in diameter - about half the width of a human hair and invisible to the naked eye.

Fabricated using a nanoscale 3D printer, its intricate spiral structure is designed to twist light, enabling new possibilities in imaging, sensing, and next-generation optical technologies.

Professor Dholakia said the work opens up new possibilities for translating advanced optical physics into practical technologies.

“We are very excited about where this research can go next,” he said. “It brings high-precision light-based sensing much closer to real-world applications.”

Precise measurement of liquids underpins everything from disease diagnostics to food safety and advanced manufacturing. But existing techniques often require larger sample volumes or complex instrumentation.

By using twisted light, we have opened the door to faster, earlier diagnosis from just a drop of blood,” said first author Dr Chris Perrella, Adelaide University’s School of Biological Sciences.

“This new method offers a much higher sensitivity with only tiny samples required and the potential for real-time, multi-point measurements, than is currently achievable.”

Future versions of the system could be integrated into compact devices powered by optical frequency combs — laser systems that generate many wavelengths (colours) of light simultaneously — enabling rapid analysis of complex biological samples.

Ultimately, the technology could lead to next-generation point-of-care testing devices, allowing clinicians to analyse blood and other fluids quickly using only minute samples.

Read the full piece here.

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Building an ecosystem – and ensuring women are a key part of it

Posted on by Allison Ng

Building an ecosystem – and ensuring women are a key part of it

8 March 2026
Rachael Vorwerk

The biggest thing our Centre is trying to do is explore how microcombs might transform society, and to build an ecosystem to make that happen.

We want that ecosystem to take full advantage of the plethora of creativity and drive that Australia has to offer.

However, sadly today, half of that ecosystem is woefully underrepresented – particularly in senior roles.

So what are we doing about this as a Centre?

On International Women’s Day (and every day!), our Centre aims to level the playing field and create opportunities for women in research – and there’s still more to do.

How are we balancing the scales?

⚖️ We ran a Career Restart Grant in 2025 with a successful participant to give someone the opportunity to reignite their career after a career break

⚖️ Supported our researchers who are also carers to attend our Annual Workshop, by employing support staff

⚖️ We ran a Culture Survey in 2025 that showed us a baseline of data of where our Centre stands (with the aim to provide interventions to then follow up in 2027).

⚖️ We have a PhD student researching our COMBS practices in equity, diversity and inclusion

⚖️ We are rolling out an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Commitment across the Centre, so it’s embedded in every decision we make

⚖️ We have upskilled our Centre members at the annual InSTEM event about challenges and solutions in equity, diversity and inclusion

Read more about our Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Centre initiatives so far.

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2026 COMBS Annual Workshop wrap-up

Posted on by Zara Falkiner-Rose

2026 COMBS Annual Workshop wrap-up

20 February 2026
Rachael Vorwerk

The 2026 COMBS Annual Workshop has just wrapped up in Wollongong.

It was a fantastic four days of presentations, poster sessions, team building and plenty of laughs with more than 120 members of our COMB-unity from across the world.

Together we explored astronomy, precision sensing and measurement, seismology, data communications, laser physics, microscopy and spectroscopy, and education and equity, diversity and inclusion.

The inaugural COMBS Awards

Research excellence doesn’t happen in isolation – it grows through people and collaboration. Our inaugural COMBS Awards aimed to celebrate just that!

At our 2026 COMBS Annual Workshop, we were proud to recognise outstanding individuals and teams across all career stages whose contributions continue to strengthen our Centre and research community.

A massive congratulations to all our award recipients!

✨ Early Career Research Impact Award – Gabriel Britto Monteiro

✨ Early Career Research Outreach and Engagement Award – Prina B.

✨ Early Career Research Award – Caitlin Murray

✨ Team Impact Award – HDR Connect Organising Committee (Megha Sharma, Madeline Hennessey, Ruth Waterman, Gabriel Britto Monteiro, Evan Diamandikos and Jorge Acosta)

✨ Team Outreach and Engagement Award – “Microcomb On Tour” Team (Ben Saunders, Caitlin Murray, Chawaphon (Park) Prayoonyong, and Bill Corcoran)

✨ Team Outreach and Engagement Award – Early Career Researcher Forum (Lisa Haerteis, Sonya Palmer and Toby Mitchell)

✨ Team Research Award – The High Index Glass Microring Survey Team (Yang Sun, Toby Mitchell, Caitlin Murray and Chawaphon (Park) Prayoonyong)

✨ Mentoring and Supervision Award – Irina Kabakova

✨ Director’s Commendation Award – Caitlin Murray

✨ Director’s Special Award – Martijn de Sterke

✨ COMBS Best Poster Award (HDR Students) – Lantian Wei

✨ COMBS Best Poster Award (ECRs, Research Staff & Associate Investigators) – Lisa Haerteis

We’re looking forward to continuing this spirit of innovation, collaboration and collective growth throughout the year ahead.

Well done all!

See highlights from the event in the photo gallery below.

COMBS Award winners

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Sundials, egg timers, or the stopwatch on your phone – what’s the most accurate way to measure a second?

Posted on by Zara Falkiner-Rose

Sundials, egg timers, or the stopwatch on your phone – what’s the most accurate way to measure a second?

16 January 2026
Rachael Vorwerk

Sundials, egg timers, or the stopwatch on your phone – what’s the most accurate way to measure a second?

Listen to Andre Luiten on ABC Adelaide (at 1:09:03)

In a review article published in Optica, our researchers explore how time is measured at the highest level of precision – and what it takes to count hundreds of trillions of atomic ticks per second.

Until recently, the most accurate atomic clocks rely on extremely stable caesium atoms that deliver billions of ticks per second.

This approach is currently being surpassed by a new generation of even more precise atomic clocks. These use optical signals that tick much faster – around a hundred trillion ticks per second.

The only way to work with these atoms is to use a sophisticated tool called an optical frequency comb – this makes these ticks comprehensible by normal electronics.

The challenge is that combs and clocks are still large, complex, and fragile.

At our Centre, we’re working to make the atomic clock + optical frequency comb a powerful frontrunner combination for measuring the second as accurately as possible – by transforming bulky frequency combs into compact, robust microcombs.

Congratulations to Tara Fortier from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Helen Margolis from the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), and our Chief Investigator Andre Luiten on this timely review article.

 

Read the full review article in Optica here: https://opg.optica.org/optica/fulltext.cfm?uri=optica-13-1-143

 

Read the Adelaide University media release here: https://adelaideuni.edu.au/about/news/2026/taking-a-second-to-change-the-time/

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COMBS Summer School: Building literacy in optical frequency combs beyond our Centre

Posted on by Zara Falkiner-Rose

COMBS Summer School: Building literacy in optical frequency combs beyond our Centre

12 December 2025
Rachael Vorwerk

Within our Centre and in the broader photonics community, very few people have experience with optical frequency combs, let alone microcombs.

Following the Australian and New Zealand Conference on Optics and Photonics in
Auckland in December 2025 – where we showcased a working microcomb – we ran our inaugural COMBS Mini Summer School with more than 85 attendees.

In partnership with the Dodd-Walls Centre, five COMBS speakers covered optical frequency comb fundamentals, applications, and a hands-on demonstration.

Summer School speaker program:

  • Scott Diddams from University of Colorado Boulder
  • Martijn de Sterke from University of Sydney
  • Stephane Coen from University of Auckland
  • Irina Kabakova from University of Technology Sydney
  • Bill Corcoran from Monash University

Each of these lectures were recorded and are available to watch on the COMBS YouTube channel.

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Building the next-generation of microcomb researchers with our industry partners

Posted on by Zara Falkiner-Rose

Building the next-generation of microcomb researchers with our industry partners

11 November 2025
Rachael Vorwerk

To set our microcombs on a pathway to real-world application, we need to connect with industry partners.

Our Industry Workshop was truly a day of matchmaking, bringing together our researchers and industry partners to develop PhD projects that embed our PhD students within industry through internships.

We brought together our fundamental physicists, technologists, seismologists, internet infrastructure experts and biomedical imaging experts – and paired them with our industry partners spanning the National Measurement Institute, Australia, DSTG, terra15, MOGLabs, Zabidou and Advanced Navigation.

The result? A room full of exchanged ideas, opportunities and tangible PhD projects to begin in 2026.

We now have five PhD projects that are in the works, giving students the chance to gain hands-on experience within industry through internships.

Read more about Our Partnerships at COMBS

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Altitude sickness and bumpy roads – designing a robust measurement tool to enable the search for Earth-like planets

Posted on by Rachael Vorwerk

Altitude sickness and bumpy roads – designing a robust measurement tool to enable the search for Earth-like planets

9 July 2025
Rachael Vorwerk

The two Keck telescopes peering into the centre of the Milky Way galaxy. Credit: Sean Goebel

When you’re trying to fix something, you want to make sure you’ve got the right tool that’s reliable enough for the job – and that’s exactly what our astronomers and technologists set out to do last month at the W. M. Keck Observatory atop Maunakea in Hawaii.

Measurement is key to astronomy. Rough estimates just won’t cut it when we’re trying to discover Earth-like planets orbiting sun-like stars, test whether Einstein’s theory of relativity holds up, or figure out if the laws of physics have stayed constant over time.

The optical frequency comb for astronomy, or “astrocomb,” is the world’s most accurate ruler, and it could be the tool we need. This ruler helps astronomers as a reference point for all the data arriving from the skies each night after observations – when it works.

But here’s the issue: Current astrocombs are prone to breaking due to their complexity, which leads to incomplete datasets and only snippets of the bigger picture. They’re also expensive, which means many observatories can’t afford them. To make matters worse, they don’t measure into the bluest wavelengths – the critical wavelengths needed to see features of Earth-like planets.

The astrocomb could still hold the answer – but only if we can make it more robust, so it can run 24/7 for decades, measure in the bluer wavelengths, and withstand the bumpy trek up to astronomical observatories.

Bringing together technologists and astronomers to overcome the technical challenges of getting a more accurate measurement tool up to the astroconomical observatories of Maunakea, was the purpose of the Astrocombs Theme Workshop held last month, where our researchers from Caltech, Menlo, Keck, and our Australian contingent spanning Swinburne, RMIT, Monash, and ANU came together.

And to really understand the challenges first-hand, it was crucial for our technologists to experience:

  • The bumpy road up to the top of the mountain to the telescopes to ensure the tool they create is robust enough to withstand this trek
  • The head fogginess of altitude sickness, operating on just 60% of the oxygen our brains are used to
  • The constantly-changing climate at more than 4,000 metres elevation, when cloud passes over or when weather changes quickly 
  • And the enormous scale and resource limitations of these enormous telescopes at the Keck Observatory, Canada France Hawaii Telescope (CFHT), and International Gemini Observatory.

Ironing out these needs was the purpose of the Astrocombs Theme Workshop held last month, where our researchers from Caltech, Menlo, Keck, and our Australian contingent spanning Swinburne, RMIT, Monash, and ANU came together.

A huge thanks to Keck Observatory for hosting us – learn more about what our Astrocombs Theme is working on below.

Learn more about Astrocombs

Developing consistent standards in biomedical imaging for developmental biology and cancer diagnostics

Posted on by Zara Falkiner-Rose

Developing consistent standards in biomedical imaging for developmental biology and cancer diagnostics

3 July 2025
Rachael Vorwerk

Biomedical imaging at high resolution – without needing extra labels that could affect the sample – is a game changer for developmental biology, cancer diagnostics and ophthalmology.

But the field behind this promise – Brillouin microscopy – still lacks standardised practices, making data hard to compare and interpret across studies and different labs.

COMBS researchers Prof Irina Kabakova and Dr Hadi Mahmodi, together with many world-leading Brillouin microscopy specialists, published a consensus statement in Nature Photonics that set out to change that. It’s a major step toward consistency, clinical translation, and real-world impact.

Read the article in Nature Photonics.

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