Recently, TIAN Pengfei, associate professor of the Department of Light Sources and Illuminating Engineering, and his team developed a laser-based white-light source for high-efficiency underwater solid-state lighting and high-speed underwater wireless optical communication. PhD candidate LIU Xiaoyan is the first author of the published paper on Optics Express on 16 July, 2018. The results were further reported as the newsbreaks in Laser Focus World.

The senior editor of Laser Focus World, Gail Overton, said that the researchers demonstrated red/green/blue (RGB) laser-diode systems with aggregate data transmission rate of 9.7 Gbit/s for RGB laser-diode-based wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM). Furthermore, the multiplexed configuration also offers an RGB white-light underwater illumination capability that is not possible with single-laser-diode systems. Both underwater communications and underwater solid-state lighting are possible to cover a range of underwater ocean source exploration and underwater human activities.