Professor Greg Parker

Head of Nanoscale Systems Integration

Light has always been a defining factor in the life of Greg Parker, Professor of Photonics at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science.

It began with a young boy’s love of the stars in the night sky and his father’s photographic collection, many taken whilst he served in the First World War. This followed through to Greg’s internationally acclaimed career in photonics and his own passion for capturing images of deep-sky objects. ‘These things go in at the time and make a really big impact although you don’t realise it. Then, years later, they resurface.’

He vividly remembers the year the Daily Express featured the world’s first ruby laser on its front cover. ‘It was 1964, a year after the laser was invented by Maiman in America,’ he recalls. The groundbreaking invention featured a ruby rod in the middle of a Xenon flash tube and resulted in the 10-year-old disembowelling old watches to retrieve the rubies from their mechanism.

‘I dug the rubies out and got a magnifying glass to shine on them, hoping to make a laser. Of course I never did but I must have spent a year trying to do this and it was a big letdown,’ he says. The disappointment, however, didn’t put him off: ‘That was when laser and light and flashtubes all started for me,’ he adds.

His early career was spent studying and working in industry. On leaving school he joined the Harwell & Culham laboratories, also taking an HNC in applied physics at Oxford Polytechnic. Having gained a taste for study, he went to Sussex University to read maths, physics and astronomy, graduating with first class honours in 1978. He then joined the Philips Research Laboratories in Redhill and enrolled for a PhD at the University of Surrey.

Greg joined Southampton’s Department of Electronics, as it was then, in 1987. The move was partly prompted by the onset of change in the big research labs. ‘The grass was beginning to look a lot greener on the other side,’ he says. ‘Over the last 20 years a lot of those places have gone. You just can’t play anymore and they’ve become very commercial. It’s difficult to be inventive and innovative in industry, it doesn’t accommodate free thinkers very well whereas a university will.’

He steadily climbed the ranks at Southampton, specialising in novel growth systems for Silicon compatible materials and Silicon-based optoelectronics, and was appointed Chair of Photonics in 2000. During his time, Greg has designed, built and developed four LPCVD systems for the Microelectronics Group, published over 120-refereed papers, created three successful companies and is now group leader for the Nanoscale Systems Integration Group.

Around 1994 Greg had a Eureka moment with the creation of the world’s first photonic crystal to work at optical wavelengths. The cry, however, didn’t come until many months after their unintentional fabrication. ‘I had an EPSRC grant to make very thin, tall wires of single crystal Silicon,’ he says. ‘One of the early steps in the process is a sheet of Silicon with very deep holes going down into it. This was just a precursor to the process and didn’t mean anything to me at the time.’

The project was successfully completed and the samples were stored on the shelf. Six months later he was reading an article on photonic crystals – something he’d never heard of before but he now suspected the precursors could be linked to them. At a colleague’s suggestion he took some careful measurements and realised he had created the world’s first photonic crystal to work in the infra red region.

Greg convinced BTG plc to invest in the new photonic crystal technology and they invested £2.8 million in the spin out company Mesophotonics Limited in 2001. The technology allows light to be bent, routed and processed at a sub-millimetre scale resulting in a low cost, high volume production of integrated optical devices. ‘They are no more than an array of holes in an optical wave guide but by placing the holes in a certain manner you can create lots of different functionality,’ says Greg.

Another dimension to Greg’s career in light is his interest in photography, first sparked by his father. ‘Dad was born in 1900 in the squalor of the East End and to get away from a pretty grim existence he joined up very early in World War I,’ he says; ‘for some reason he decided he was going to do photography out in Afghanistan.’ As a result the Parker boys grew up in a house surrounded by boxes of old photographs. ‘It obviously had a big imprint on me and my older brother. He was a forensic photographer in Scotland Yard for 33 years,’ he adds.

In 1985 Greg created the first portable high-power, high-speed flash unit with a 1/40,000 second duration for his older brother Alan. A design that, 20 years after development, remains virtually unchanged and is still in use by award-winning nature photographer Andy Harmer.

Greg’s own photography necessitates a slightly longer exposure time; he needs two to three hours for his deep-sky imaging work. In July of this year he will stage his first exhibition of astrophotography at the University of Southampton library. The work will be entirely his own from beginning to end; all images on display will have been photographed, printed, mounted and framed by Parker himself.

He readily admits it can be an addictive obsession but one he is keen to share, and use to inspire others. He says: ‘I want other people to come in and see what a guy off the street did in a year with something you can buy commercially that someone with an ordinary job can afford. I wouldn’t have believed it!’

Although Greg has been stargazing for over 40 years and has his own mini dome observatory in his New Forest garden, he only started imaging the skies last year.

‘CCD cameras with long exposure times have only been around for about ten years and it’s only in the last five or six years you could get them at a reasonable price to do the job,’ he says. ‘I started imaging literally one year ago but the technology allows you to do it as long as you’re au fait with computers.’

The camera downloads the data which Greg then processes digitally using Adobe Photoshop. This enables him to manipulate the picture and bring out the faint detail. The result is a galaxy of prints that bring the splendours of the cosmos to life.

‘That’s why it’s a great one for me,’ he says. ‘It brings together optics, the stars, photography and the computational processing. It’s got the lot in the one hobby.’ And helps provides light relief to an academic career immersed in luminescence.

 

 

 

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