The Photonics Circle of Excellence Awards:

Now in their 15th year, these annual awards have recognized the enterprising companies and individuals who have refused to accept the status quo and have instead pushed the limits of technology to develop new photonic products and processes.
This year's 25 winning products, described on the following pages, were chosen from among the hundreds of entries submitted from around the world. They have survived the toughest scrutiny: judgment by the members of Photonics Spectra's Editorial Advisory Board - a panel of recognized experts in a variety of disciplines.
To be eligible, products had to be commercially available between June 1, 2001, and May 31, 2002.
The ceremony honoring this year's Distinction in Photonics and Circle of Excellence award winners will take place Jan. 27 in San Jose, Calif:, at the Fairmont Hotel, concurrently with Photonics West.

The product for Which Crystal Fibre was Granted the Award:

Crystal Fibre designed its highly nonlinear photonic crystal fiber with zero-dispersion wavelength at 1.55 µm to facilitate the evolution from low-bit-rate electro-optical networks to high-bit-rate all-optical networks.
The company, based in Birkerød, Denmark, says that the fiber has a nonlinear coefficient two times that of standard nonlinear fiber and that it has already been demonstrated at the Research Center COM at the Technical University of Denmark in a nonlinear optical loop mirror, demultiplexing a bit stream of 160 Gb/s down to 10 Gb/s without electro-optical conversion. The demultiplexer normally operates with 2.5 km of dispersion-shifted step-index fiber, but the photonic crystal fiber enabled operation with only 50 m of fiber, improving stability and saving cost. The fiber is polarization-maintaining with a birefringence on the same order as standard polarization-maintaining fibers. The microstructured region enables high design flexibility, and both zero-dispersion wavelength and dispersion slope can be designed to fit different applications.
The fiber's applications include 2R regenerators, optical parametric amplifiers, wavelength converters, optical sampling and supercontinuum generation. Supercontinua are useful not only for telecommunications, but also in fields such as spectroscopy and optical coherence tomography, where supercontinuum-generating photonic crystal fibers have been used as broadband light sources in the life sciences. The supercontinuum also can be used for metrology, as the generated frequency comb can be used as an optical clock.