The winner of the 10th anniversary year of the Crytur Prize is Jan Pokorný from the Faculty of Nuclear and Physical Engineering at the CTU in Prague, a PhD student from the Fiber Lasers and Non-linear Optics research team. In his thesis entitled "Thulium-doped fibre amplifier", he focused on the design of fibre amplifiers for wavelengths of 1.65-2.05 μm based on thulium-doped fibres. The master thesis was supervised by Pavel Peterka from the same research team. The device was presented at the joint Czech Optical Cluster stand at the Laser - World of Photonics exhibition in Munich in 2023.
Thulium-doped fibre is produced in the laboratories of our institute. The aim of the work was to build fiber amplifiers and tunable lasers for the mentioned optical band, and their characterization. The author also worked on the development of an optical fiber with a specially modified refractive index profile and successfully demonstrated both laser and amplifier devices using the newly developed fiber doped with this particular element. This is the first demonstration of this type of fibre. The work was presented, also as a talk at the CLEO-Europe 2023 conference.
