Inaugural COMBS Workshop at Cape Schanck

COMBS Workshop 2024

Four days, 75 attendees, and more than 50 presentations – our inaugural COMBS 2024 Workshop last week spanned topics as diverse as astronomy, fundamental physics, earthquake monitoring, medical diagnostic tools, and internet infrastructure.

Our team members discussed the research areas where we think optical frequency combs can have major impact:

  • watching earthquakes (and Taylor Swift concerts!) with optical fibres
  • turbo-charging the internet
  • exploring new ways to understand how the cells in our bodies work
  • discovering earth-like planets in distant star systems

A key part also included curiosity driven fundamental physics to help enable all these applications.

Our Workshop brought together people from academia and industry from all over the world including France, Hawaii, Denmark and New Zealand as well as all eight of our nodes in Australia.

We also refined our common vision for the potential of photonic chip frequency combs over the next decade, and finalised our near term plans for achieving that vision.

Evan Diamandikos Best Poster Award
(For COMBS 2024 Workshop)

Congratulations to our COMBS PhD student, Evan Diamandikos, for winning the Best Poster Award at the COMBS Workshop for his work that aims to improve the signal readout for point-of-care biosensors which can be compacted onto a tiny chip the size of a fingernail, making them a promising alternative to more bulky and restrictive diagnostic tools commonly used today.

Voonhui Lai Best Poster Award
(For Science Communication)

Congratulations to our Associate Investigator Voonhui Lai for winning the Best Poster Award for Science Communication. Voon’s work aims to understand how we can measure earthquakes more accurately by repurposing the same optical fibres we use for our internet as earth-motion sensors.