What in particular are your current interests in wave propagation in optical fibres and composite materials?
I got involved a few years ago in work on optical fibres through the Smith Institute, which runs a Knowledge Transfer Network to bring applied mathematicians and industrialists together. The KTN has been fantastically successful and it is really down to the work of the team at the Smith Institute including John Ockendon and OCIAM. The project was to model light propagation down ‘fat’ optical fibres. Fatter, or multimode, fibres are much cheaper to manufacture and to splice together than conventional fibres, are more robust, and are starting to find applications in aircraft and cars. In a few years time, it is likely that the messy wiring looms in vehicles will be replaced by a single fat fibre! These optical fibres behave as waveguides and allow a number of distinct modes to propagate. In the telecommunications industry, the normal thin fibres only allow a few modes to propagate and this makes the mathematical analysis a lot easier than if you have fatter fibres, which may admit tens o
