BESCLING · Beam self-cleaning beyond its current understanding
Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2025-04-01 → 2027-03-31
- EU contribution
- €242,261
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Beam self-cleaning beyond its current understanding
The BESCLING project explored a recently discovered optical effect called beam self‑cleaning, which allows light travelling in multimode optical fibres to become more stable and easier to control. Multimode fibres are widely used in modern technologies such as medical imaging, industrial laser processing, and sensing. However, their performance is often limited by unstable light patterns caused by temperature changes or mechanical vibrations. Beam self‑cleaning offers a promising solution by naturally reshaping the light into a cleaner and more stable form when the power exceeds a certain level. The goal of BESCLING was to better understand the physical mechanisms behind this effect. While earlier studies focused only on the spatial behaviour of light, this project investigated how space and time interact during beam self‑cleaning. Understanding these mechanisms can contribute to the development of more robust fibre‑based technologies, with potential benefits in healthcare, manufacturing, and environmental monitoring. The project was carried out over a limited duration and focused on establishing new knowledge that can support future research in nonlinear and multimode fibre optics.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The goal of BESCLING is to shed light on the physics of the beam self-cleaning (BSC) effect. This is driven by Kerr nonlinearity and consists of the spontaneous increase of the spatial quality of a multimode beam, which turns from speckles in the linear regime to a bell shape at sufficiently high power. Since its first observation, BSC has attracted great interest, mostly because it allows for improving the performances of state-of-the-art optical fibre technologies; remarkable examples are the power scale-up of fibre lasers and the resolution enhancement of multiphoton imaging devices. Despite these successes, the physical mechanisms behind BSC are still largely debated. Specifically, recent experiments demonstrated that for achieving BSC the temporal beam evolution plays a pivotal role. Whereas the temporal dimension has been often ignored in the investigation of BSC.Here, I propose a new approach to dig into the physics of BSC. I will build up a holographic mode decomposition tool, which, in addition to retrieving the mode occupation at the fibre output, allows for obtaining information on the beam temporal profile. This will pave the way to a fully spatiotemporal interpretation of BSC, e.g., it will enable the understanding of the simultaneous occurrence of BSC and supercontinuum generation, whose physical interpretation has been largely disregarded, so far. In addition, to survey the generality of BSC, I will explore photonics platforms beyond standard multimode optical fibres like few-mode optical fibres and lossy fibres made of soft glass or polymer. To date, theoretical models do not apply to these types of systems and, from the experimental point of view, only a few observations of BSC have been reported.To this goal, the Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Carnot de Bourgogne is the perfect Host Institution since it is the only laboratory in Europe that combines expertise in all aspects of BESCLING, from nonlinear guided optics to special fibre fabrication.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE CNRS · ParisCoordinatorFrance
Links
- View on CORDIS
- DOI: 10.3030/101209943
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e525af3845&appId=PPGMS
Data: CORDIS, © European Union