Aston

Aston University is a public research university situated in the city centre of Birmingham, England. Aston began as the Birmingham Municipal Technical School in 1895, evolving into the UK’s first College of Advanced Technology in 1956. Aston University received its royal charter from Queen Elizabeth II on 22 April 1966.

Within Aston University, MOCCA is coordinated by the Aston Institute of Photonic  Technologies (AIPT).

AIPT is one of the largest photonics research centres in the UK, with 90+ staff and current grant funding amounting to €20M, of which the majority come from EU projects. The key research areas include high-speed optical transmission and processing, in fibre-based optical devices and components, nonlinear photonics, and in fibre optic sensors. It has recently successfully expanded its activities in a number of key areas including femtosecond pulsed laser techniques, medical sensing devices, and planar integrated optical circuits.

AIPT’s success has been built on significant achievements in high-speed optical transmission and processing, nonlinear photonics, fibre grating technology, femtosecond laser material processing techniques, nano-photonics, fibre lasers, bio- and medical photonics, and in various fibre optic sensing applications.
AIPT maintains active and fertile collaborations with industrial companies and academic institutions throughout the world. AIPT has accumulated valuable experience in supervising and administrating diversified research projects, fostering new research and industrial collaborations, undertaking various training activities, and managing world class research facilities available for new projects.

Infrastructures and Equipment

AIPT provides outstanding facilities and infrastructure that are ideally suited for research and training activities within the MOCCA Project .
AIPT’s experimental work is carried out in 30 laboratories covering 1500 square metres. Facilities include two fibre re-circulating loops (10/40 Gbit/s), BERT (10/40Gbit/s), 3 major UV laser systems for the fabrication of fibre gratings; Class 10000 (locally 1000) cleanroom; 5 state-of-the-art fibre laser laboratories, environmental test chambers and a range of other equipment. A high-performance computer cluster is built with 28 Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2609 v2 @ 2.50GHz with 8 cores each.