PhD candidate Svetlana Saparina will receive funding from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research.

Her upcoming dissertation, titled “Nanodiagnostics of carbon allotropes with electro-induced Raman scattering,” is supervised by Associate Professor Sergey Kharintsev (Department of Optics and Nanophotonics, Kazan Federal University). The work deals with amorphous carbon nanocoating for optical fiber.

Saparina explains, “Optical fiber is widely used in telecom, medicine, and in spectroscopic and acoustic detectors for oil prospecting. The latter type of fibers are exposed to extreme temperatures of up to 300 C and pressure of up 150 atmospheres, which leads to surface cracking. To protect fibers from aggressive environments, they are often covered in a thin layer of amorphous carbon. Unfortunately, hydrogen and water still can get on the fiber’s surface, which leads to sizable optical losses and lower effectiveness of such detectors in general. There is still no complete understanding of why defects appear in the carbon layer.”

Her research is targeted at Raman scattering and a method to conduct nano-spectroscopic analysis of the surface of disordered conducted nano structure in order to study the heterogeneous carbon layer composition.

“Our method of electro-induced Raman scattering can open opportunities to visualize the current density in the contact points of carbon nanostructures and thus visualize the heterogeneous surface of the carbon layer. Furthermore, the strengthening of the optical near field in such points can help solve the spectral structure of the strongly overlapped bands of the Raman spectrum of the carbon layer,” adds Saparina.

This can contribute both to applied solutions for carbon coatings and composites and to fundamental research of Raman scattering.

Source text: Larisa Busil

Translation: Yury Nurmeev