The EIC Pathfinder project ULTRAPURE is based on a consortium of international experts from science and industry in France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Germany. The research project is scheduled to start in February 2026 and will be coordinated by Prof. Dr. Thomas Schneider, head of the THz Photonics Research Group at the Institute of High Frequency Technology at the Technical University of Braunschweig.
ULTRAPURE will explore the generation of ultra-pure waves in the radio frequency, microwave, terahertz (THz), and optical ranges, enabled by stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) in an integrated thin-film lithium tantalate (TFLT) platform, in order to realize new applications ranging from THz communication, radar, and atomic clocks to quantum computers.
The simultaneous integration of SBS with other functions such as lasers and high-speed optical modulation on a single chip will result in significant improvements in size, weight, and power consumption. This will lead to the first commercially viable products for the generation of ultra-pure oscillations, offering greater freedom, stability, and tunability.
The simultaneous use of the electro-acousto-optic effect through SBS in a common integrated platform makes it possible to suppress a large part of the phase noise. In addition, the chip size allows it to be placed in a cryogenic chamber to suppress thermal noise, opening up possibilities for applications in areas such as quantum computing, quantum sensing, and many others.
Purer waves and lower noise also enable higher data rates and lower energy consumption for wireless or optical communication networks in the Internet of the future, so that ULTRAPURE can lead to new communication applications with lower resource consumption.