Conference Agenda

Main objectives of RAVEN

Objective 1: Develop a VIS-SWIR gas sensor system composed of three chips. The first chip is a powerful, affordable, and compact supercontinuum light source designed for gas sensing. This chip aims to have minimal coupling loss and an overall power output of about 100 mW. It includes a high-peak microchip laser and a LiNbO3 waveguide operating in the 400-1700 nm range with a waveguiding loss of no more than 1 dB/cm. The second chip consists of gas sensing components designed to function in harsh environments. It features a double spiral waveguide for evanescent sensing, combined with a Bloch Surface Wave platform to detect gases within the 600-1700 nm spectral range. The third chip is a data processing chip that employs both standard and heterodyne interferometry on a SiO2 chip. This chip utilizes a hybrid polymer/TiO2 waveguide to enable on-chip data analysis using a quantum-inspired approach, improving the limit of detection and selectivity for various gases.

Objective 2: Develop a compact photoacoustic cell combined with a tunable MIR laser to create the MIR sensing system. This system will be capable of detecting gases like CO2, CO, CH4, NH3, and N2O, with a detection limit ranging from 1 to 10 parts per billion (ppb), depending on the gas.

Objective 3: Evaluate the VIS-SWIR and MIR sensors with end users in the laboratory under conditions simulating real-world environments for various applications, including monitoring greenhouse gases and air pollutants in terrestrial settings, quantifying dissolved methane in seawater for climate change impact studies and monitoring offshore pipeline leaks, and measuring concentrations of methane, methanol, and ammonia above surface waters for monitoring and researching episodic pollution events.

Environmental water pollution is a growing global issue, leading to increasing regulations and concurrent increased demand for improved water quality monitoring solutions to meet the European Green Deal objectives. To this end, IBAIA will design, develop and combine four innovative and complementary sensors for continuous water analysis: 1) a Mid-IR sensor detecting organic chemical pollutants, 2) a VIS-NIR sensor detecting salinity and microplastics, 3) an optode detecting physical- chemical parameters, and 4) an EC sensor detecting metallic trace elements (MTE) and nutrient salts (NS). These four sensors will be integrated and packaged into a single advanced multisensing system. The IBAIA system will more accurately monitor a wider range of parameters than existing solutions in a one-size-fits-all solution for many end users, with a highly EU-centric supply chain, that will supplant a wide number of inferior non-EU alternative solutions.

Miniaturized, yet highly sensitive and fast LiDAR systems serve market demands for their use on platforms ranging from robots, drones, and autonomous vehicles (cars, trains, boats, etc.) that are mostly used in complex environments. The widespread use of high-performance LiDAR tools faces a need for cost and size reduction. A key component of a LiDAR system is the light source. Very few lasers light sources exist that provide sufficient performance to achieve the required distance range, distance resolution and velocity accuracy of the emerging applications identified in LiDAR roadmaps. The available sources, namely single mode or multimode laser diodes and fiber lasers, are either very costly, not sufficiently robust or not compact enough. In OPHELLIA, we will investigate advanced materials and integration technologies directed to produce novel PIC building blocks, namely high gain, high output power (booster) amplifiers and on-chip isolators that are not yet available in a PIC format with the required performance. The novel building blocks will be monolithically integrated onto the Si3N4 generic photonic platform to produce high performance laser sources with unprecedented high coherence and high power, which will have a profound impact on the performance of the systems. Advanced packaging will further contribute to a dramatic reduction of the overall cost. To achieve this ambitious goal, OPHELLIA will leverage the expertise of its consortium members, ranging from materials, integration technologies and PIC design to packaging and LiDAR systems integration, which covers the full chain from innovation to the deployment of the technology in a relevant environment. The successful realization of OPHELLIA will not only represent a milestone towards the widespread utilization of LiDAR systems, but the developed building blocks will also have an enormous impact in other emerging application fields such as datacom/telecom, sensing/spectroscopy and quantum technology.

BIOCELLPHE provides frontier scientific and technological advancements to generate a breakthrough technology realizing the identification of proteins (i.e. phenotyping) as diagnostic biomarkers at single-cell level with unmatched sensitivity, multiplexing capabilities and portability. BIOCELLPHE proposes the generation of engineered bacteria able to recognize and bind to specific protein targets on the surface of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) responsible for cancer metastasis, thereby triggering the production of chemical signals that can be detected simultaneously, and with extremely high sensitivity by surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). SERS is a powerful analytical technique that employs plasmonic nanoparticles as optical enhancers for ultrasensitive chemical analysis achieving single-molecule detection level. BIOCELLPHE will implement these advancements toward the generation of an optofluidic lab-on-a-chip SERS device enabling ultrasensitive identification and multiplex phenotyping of CTCs. We anticipate that BIOCELLPHE long-term vision and scientific breakthrough will lead to a sky limit technology that will be widely applicable, not only in the diagnostic arena, but also in many other applications (e.g. biomedical, environmental). No one has previously been able to attempt this vision due to current challenges and technical limitations, but we believe to be in a position to pave a way for achieving this now. To realize this highly ambitious project, BIOCELLPHE gathers a highly multidisciplinary community of leading experts in synthetic biology, nanotechnology, plasmonics, microfluidics, artificial intelligence, and cancer diagnosis. We believe that successful deployment of BIOCELLPHE has the potential to usher in a new era of medical diagnostics and it will provide new paradigms in biology and biomedicine, advancing frontier science and technologies at the European academic and industrial sectors.

The overall objective of the TinyBrains project is to build a unique platform that allows the non-invasive, three-dimensional imaging of cerebral hemodynamics and oxygen metabolism simultaneously with cerebral electrophysiology to understand the biological origins of brain damage that occurs in infants born with CHD.

The project is primarily dedicated for furthering scientific knowledge with the introduction of a new hybrid platform for neuromonitoring.

An optical neuroimaging device to understand the mechanisms of brain damage in infants born with severe CHD.

The EU-Horizon-2020 ISMarD project aims to develop a smart multifunctional tooth implant for providing a long-term solution for preventing the condition of peri-implantitis. Peri-implantitis is a dental implant-related inflammatory condition induced by oral bacteria. The lack of ossification of implant with surrounding bone and soft-tissue integration leave interstitial ingress of bacteria-laden oral fluid which increases lowers the pH around the implant-alveolar bone region. Increased acidity persistent acidity leads to bone resorption, increased pain and eventual failure of implant due to bone loss. In ISMarD, the project aims to design and manufacture infection resistant implants, that are able to ossify and integrate with soft-tissue after one-step surgery. The implants will be tested in vitro using two approaches – in the standard cell and microbial cultures and in micro-fluidic/opto-micro fluidic reactors before testing in vivo in minipig and beagle dog models. The programme of research and demonstration also aims to show the sustainable manufacturing by design for prolonging the implant lifetime and diagnostics.