Harnessing The Invisible: How Uottawa Teamed With OZ Optics To Advance Terahertz Photonics

When Professor Jean-Michel Ménard arrived at the University of Ottawa in 2017, he brought with him a fascination for a region of light most of us will never see. His lab, the Ultrafast Terahertz research group — also called the Ménard Lab — studies a slice of the electromagnetic spectrum that was once neglected but is now opening up new possibilities in communications, imaging and molecular analysis.

“My research focus is on terahertz photonics,” Ménard explains. “Terahertz is this region of the electromagnetic spectrum of light between microwaves and the visible, near-infrared region. It’s a region where there are not many applications because up until relatively recently, maybe twenty years ago, nobody was actually able to easily access and detect radiation in this window.”

That “invisible” region, as he calls it, is where his collaboration with Oz Opticsnorth_eastexternal link, a Kanata-based global leader in fibre-optic components, took root , and where they’ve spent nearly a decade shaping the future of photonics.

A partnership sparked over dinner
The partnership didn’t begin in a lab, but at an embassy dinner. “When I arrived in Canada to be a professor at the University of Ottawa, I quickly realized that you need to team up with industry to be able to access the most interesting funding opportunities,” Ménard recalls.

A colleague told him, “You just have to go out there and talk to people. There’s no other way.” That prompted Ménard to accept an invitation to a dinner at the German ambassador’s residence. “I arrived too early because I guess I was too excited,” he laughs. “There was another person there: Zahid Sezerman, who is the vice-president of human resources at Oz Optics. We just started chatting, and she said that I should come over and have a tour. And that’s how it started.”

Soon afterwards, Oz Optics became one of the first companies to back the research Ménard was conducting through an Ontario Centres of Excellencenorth_eastexternal link program and an NSERC Engage grant, and their support helped launch his group at uOttawa.

Building tools for the terahertz era
Over the years, the collaboration produced several breakthroughs. One of the earliest and most remarkable was a compact device called a peak-field booster. “It’s a very neat small device that takes the power, the peak power that comes out of a laser, and increases it,” he says. “You don’t need any energy, but the peak energy is actually increased; we do this by taking time and compressing the energy in time.”

This early success led to an NSERC Alliance grant in 2021, through which the partners developed a prototype terahertz spectroscopy system. Oz Optics showcased the prototype at trade shows, a compelling example of how to bridge the gap between university research and commercial innovation.

Even during the pandemic, they kept collaborating. “It’s been almost eight years now or nine,” says Ménard. “We’ve written some papers together, we’ve written some patents together. It’s been very fruitful.”

The impact of collaboration
For Ménard, working with Oz Optics offered lessons that no classroom could teach. “I did my bachelor’s, master’s and PhD in physics — I work in physics — but there’s nobody who tells you how industry works, what’s “in”, how basically, the world, the economic world, works,” he reflects.

“Oz is really, really good at taking an idea and bringing it to market,” he says. “They were there to guide us, asking how can this lead to a product, how do you make it useful, or how to keep thinking about cost efficiency and things like that.”

These insights reshaped how Ménard thinks about research. “It’s really eye-opening to be able to do research, but also keep in mind what’s going to happen to this research,” he explains. “After the collaboration with Oz, I have a much better understanding of what it takes to get innovations to market.”

The partnership also gave his students a taste of real-world R&D. “I had students who went there, who had the chance to talk with the CEO, vice-presidents, researchers at Oz, and to interact with them,” he says. “It’s something I could not provide as a professor, but only through these collaborations.”

Laying the groundwork for tomorrow
Beyond the lab, the collaboration has led to new fields of discovery, including a project under the National Research Council’s High-throughput and Secure Networks (HTSN) Challenge Program that will test the feasibility of terahertz communications for remote areas. And while Oz Optics has since pivoted to new markets, the research continues to evolve in Ménard's lab, where they are now pursuing terahertz technology for medical applications.

“What I’m working on, along with what I'm doing right now, is trying to apply terahertz spectroscopy to medical applications,” he explains. “It would be interesting to see if it can be used for early cancer detection.”

Even though Oz Optics has moved on from terahertz products, Ménard believes that the foundation they laid is crucial. “We’ve been helping Oz for the past eight years to develop photonics systems to address a new market that they wanted to expand on,” he says. “On our side, they supported the research and allowed us to expand — to become the lab we are now.”

A shared language of innovation
The most enduring aspect of the nearly decade-long collaboration is mutual understanding. “When you collaborate that long, you start speaking the same language,” Ménard reflects. “You understand each other’s goals. That’s what makes research truly move forward.”

From an embassy dinner to an eight-year research partnership, Ménard’s journey with Oz Optics shows how shared curiosity can shed light even on the invisible.