Bandwidth limits of luminescent solar concentrators as detectors in free-space optical communication systems

Abstract

Optics: Optimising Luminescent Solar Concentrators for applications in optical systems Modelling the bandwidth limits of Luminescent Solar Concentrators (LSCs) offers vital insights into their behaviour and provides a technique for evaluating their use in various applications. Although LSCs have emerged as a promising receiver technology in free-space optical communications due to their ability to collect light from a wide field-of-view and concentrate it into small areas, the comparably slow timescale of their fluorescence events may pose a bottleneck on the bandwidth of high-speed communication systems. A team of researchers led by Ioannis Papakonstantinou from University College London has developed a technique that delineates the fundamental limits of LSCs as optical detectors and demonstrated time-domain Monte-Carlo simulation for optimising LSC based receiver systems. The work opens the door for the use of LSCs in applications in visible light communications, high-speed video recording, and real-time biological imaging.