Award for MPSP PhD candidate Felix Wanitschke at Photonics West 2026

At this year's Photonics West, Felix Wanitschke, PhD candidate at the Max Planck School of Photonics, impressed the audience with his presentation “Experimental investigations on the relative phase stability in amplifying multicore fibers” and was awarded the “Fiber Lasers Best Student Presentation Award” for his work.
 

In his work, Felix Wanitschke experimentally investigated the stability of relative phases in multi-core fiber amplifiers—a key prerequisite for stable coherent beam combining (CBC). His results provide the first experimental evidence that ytterbium-doped multi-core fibers can behave like shielded interferometric systems: the relative phases of the individual amplification channels remain remarkably stable even at high output powers.

Felix Wanitschke is part of the Fiber & Waveguide Lasers working group led by Prof. Jens Limpert, a scholarship holder at the Max Planck School of Photonics, and an associate at the Helmholtz Institute Jena.The working group has been one of the leading international teams in laser development for many years. Its young scientists regularly impress at Photonics West with outstanding contributions—proof of the consistently excellent research conducted at the Institute of Applied Physics at Friedrich Schiller University Jena.

Photonics West is considered one of the world's largest and most important conferences in the field of photonics. Every year, more than 20,000 experts from research and industry gather to present and discuss the latest developments in laser and optical technologies. An award on this stage not only highlights the impressive presentation, but also the scientific relevance and high international recognition of the research work from Jena.