The Russian Science Foundation has announced the results of its megagrant competition for conducting fundamental and exploratory scientific research under the leadership of prominent foreign scientists. Skoltech’s project in the field of nonlinear wave systems and integrated photonic devices was selected as one of the 14 winners.

Winning the megagrant competition secured the research team annual funding of 50 million rubles. The funding is granted for five years, with the possible three-year extension. The project will be led by Andrey Gelash, a world-renowned expert in the theory and modeling of nonlinear wave phenomena. Together with colleagues, he developed the theory of soliton gas and the nonlinear stage of modulational instability in the nonlinear Schrödinger equation, as well as a perturbation theory for bi-solitons.

“Our project is aimed at solving fundamental theoretical and experimental problems in the physics of nonlinear wave systems and integrated photonic devices, while laying a technological foundation in areas such as integrated photonics, telecommunications, and ocean wave forecasting,” said project leader Andrey Gelash. “The research is intended to demonstrate the universality of nonlinear physics approaches across hydrodynamics, long-haul fiber optics, and integrated nonlinear photonics.”

The prototypes of integrated photonic device components to be developed during the project will be in high demand in the telecommunications industry, sensing, and radiophysics.

“The Skoltech Engineering Physics Center has received a major boost toward achieving its core mission of rapidly transforming fundamental research into device prototyping for industrial partners,” said Professor Vladimir Drachev, the director of the Skoltech Engineering Physics Center and a member of the project key contributors. “A theoretical group led by Andrey Gelash will be established at the center, focusing on nonlinear wave systems and optical devices, with technological groundwork laid for integrated photonics, telecommunications, and ocean wave prediction. The project builds upon the substantial achievements of Professor Korotkevich’s team in numerical modeling of fiber-optic technologies, telecommunications, and the development of new algorithms. Experimental nonlinear integrated photonics will be carried out at the Skoltech Plasmonics Laboratory, which is equipped with a full-cycle infrastructure for design, fabrication (including electron-beam lithography and plasma etching), and testing of silicon integrated devices. The project’s experiments in on-chip nonlinear photonics will be based on advanced theoretical methods under the guidance of the lead scientist. This part of the project will be focused on design, fabrication, and technology development for silicon integrated nonlinear photonic devices, such as nonlinear-optical thresholders, optical neurons with nonlinear activation functions, optical frequency comb, and soliton generators. The project opens up a new research direction for the lab and the center as a whole.”

“Internet traffic volumes continue to grow every year, so designing new and upgrading existing long-haul fiber-optic networks remains a continuous process. A critical tool for optimizing the parameters of future communication lines is a high-speed computing core that can simulate signal propagation over thousands of kilometers of optical fiber with high accuracy in a fraction of a second,” said Professor Alexander Korotkevich from the Skoltech Engineering Physics Center and a member of the project key contributors.

The researchers will also develop a complete software suite for the simulator’s computing core, based entirely on a sovereign software platform.

“Forecasting wind-driven sea waves is an important component in assessing the risks of maritime transportation. All models currently used in the industry are based on modifications of the Hasselmann kinetic equation, which is closely linked to one of the most well-known applications of nonlinear wave theory — the theory of wave turbulence,” added Professor Alexander Korotkevich.

The RSF megagrant competition is one of the largest initiatives supporting scientific research in Russia. This year, the competition received 230 applications from 127 research organizations in the fundamental research category, and 27 technological proposals from domestic companies in the applied research category.