31 Aug 2022 by James McKenzie
James McKenzie marvels at the wonders of photonics, which is so much more crucial to everyday life than it first appears
Which industry employs twice as many people in the UK as pharmaceuticals and more than either the space or “fintech” sectors? The answer is photonics, according to the Photonics Leadership Group (PLG) – a trade association representing more than 120 members in the field. For the last few years, it has been tracking and collating all the myriad applications of optical technologies or photonics. That’s no easy task given that most emerge from hundreds of small- and medium-sized enterprises.
According to the PLG’s UK Photonics 2035 report, some 76 000 people are employed in the photonics industry in 1200 firms across all UK regions, generating £14.5bn of turnover each year. With a gross value added to the economy of £85 000 per employee, photonics is the fifth most productive UK manufacturing sector, the report says. British universities, it claims, are global leaders in the field, with some 20% of global publications in photonics originating in the UK.
What’s more, the PLG reckons photonics could become a £50bn industry for the UK and generate an additional 100 000 direct jobs by 2035. “There is a lot more to come if the UK government invests in key transformative technologies in photonics in key vertical markets like energy, health-care and clean transport alongside private-sector investors,” says PLG chief executive John Lincoln. Indeed, the group estimates that about 60% of the UK economy will directly depend on photonics in the future.
The PLG has been doing a great job raising awareness of photonics and representing its members – many of whom aren’t big enough on their own to influence governments and investors in the way that big pharmaceutical and defence firms can. But photonics is hugely important, harnessing the light for everything from disease diagnosis and laser surgery to telecommunications and advanced manufacturing. Photonics is critical to making products and services deliver value to consumers and industry.
According to the EU’s Photonics21 network, the global market for photonics was worth €650bn in 2020, but it’s the things that photonics enables when combined into products that’s amazing. Think about the CCDs and lenses in smartphones or the way that optical sensors, camera technology and LIDAR enable autonomous vehicles. A report from the SPIE in 2020 estimates the kind of markets that photonics enables is a truly staggering $2 trillion globally.
The power of light
So, what kind of value does photonics deliver and what sorts of things do photonics firms do? The most obvious application is optical-fibre communications, which has shrunk the world over the last 50 years, with no sign of progress slowing. Petabit data rates were achieved a few years ago, while by 2017 Corning had shipped more than a billion kilometres of fibre. By 2035 intra-satellite lasers will routinely allow low-Earth-orbit satellite constellations to deliver high-speed internet across the globe to even the remotest locations.
In manufacturing, photonics allows the digital cutting, joining, marking, texturing and 3D printing of materials, especially metals. Thanks to machine vision, meanwhile, photonics contributes to automated and robotic systems such as laser cutting and welding. Indeed, the industrial processing of materials accounts for about a third of the roughly £11bn global market for lasers.
Then there’s “vertical farming”, in which crops are grown in stacked layers under controlled conditions. Spectrally optimized light-emitting diodes can both optimize plant growth and reduce evaporation from the plants, meaning they require much less water than if grown outdoors. Verical farming eliminates pesticides too.
Photonics is hugely important, harnessing the light for everything from disease diagnosis and laser surgery to telecommunications and advanced manufacturing
Basic science, of course, depends on photonics, whether it’s particle accelerators, telescopes or gravitational-wave detectors. Indeed, over half of all Nobel prizes in physics awarded in the last 25 years have been either related to discoveries in photonics or used photonics as a tool.
And don’t forget the whole world of quantum computing, communications and cryptography, which is either directly based on photonics or requires photonics to function. It’s an industry that’s really starting to take off. The London-based firm Orca, which won a business start-up award from the Institute of Physics in 2020, has just sold its first quantum computer to the UK Ministry of Defence.
Real-world benefits
Photonics is also helping the world reach net-zero thanks to highly efficient photovoltaic solar cells, while advanced LIDAR – combined with computer simulation – can boost the output of wind farms. Estimates by PLG suggest that photonics will increase the efficiency of new and existing wind turbines by 1.5–2%. With little additional cost, this will provide an additional 15 GW generating capacity globally by 2035 – saving more than £100bn (roughly equivalent to five Hinkley Point C nuclear-power stations).
Light is vital in medicine too. There’s laser corrective-eye surgery, while even high-street opticians these days use a vast array of photonics tools. During a recent eye test at my local branch of Specsavers, I got chatting to my optician, who didn’t seem to know much about the physics behind the Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) system he was using, but was blown away by the images he could see. By imaging the back of the eye at different depths, opticians can use OCTs to safely spot a range of health and vision problems, often before they have become serious.
Optical fibre, optical amplifiers and atomic-clock traceable time stamps are all UK inventions. Secure quantum communications are being pioneered in the UK. In fact, I’d say Britain is uniquely positioned to be at the core of the next secure trusted telecoms revolution in 5G and 6G networks – and beyond. According to the PLG, by 2035 the UK will once again be a global provider of critical communications infrastructure.
All I can say is that if you didn’t know about photonics already, I hope you do now.
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