While optics and photonics are exciting disciplines with much research, industrial, and economic potential in the 21st century, this appreciation is only shared by a limited number of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) experts, and there is a recognized STEM skills shortage. To widen the pool of talent, it is essential to expose students to optics and photonics throughout their education and particularly starting at a young age. The Lightwave programme, consisting of an interactive collection of photonics demonstrations and experiments targeted for primary school students, was thus created to facilitate this endeavor. The programme is run by doctoral students forming a team of "Lightwave ambassadors". All the demonstrations that comprise Lightwave can be easily integrated into a physics curriculum, enabling educators to generate more student interest and enhance the image of science through an interactive pedagogy. We provide a description of the programme at its initial inception, and report on the recent additions and updates that have brought about its success, moving from a purely outreach driven focus to engaging pupils with our own research. We also discuss our approach to ensuring that our team of ambassadors are from diverse backgrounds and use both male and female students as role models. Finally, we reflect on how evaluation methods to obtain feedback from our activities are key to Lightwave's sustainability and in improving the perception of optics and photonics.

We propose and experimentally demonstrate wideband and continuously tunable fractional-order photonic Hilbert transformers (FrHT). These are realized by a single apodized planar Bragg grating within a high-birefringence planar substrate. The fractional order of the FrHT is continuously tuned and precisely controlled by changing the polarization state of the input light. The experimental characterization demonstrates an operating bandwidth up to 120 GHz with amplitude ripples below 3 dB. The optical phase shift response is directly measured to verify the proposed tuning property, demonstrating transform orders of around 1, 0.7, and 0.5. This approach is simple, stable, and compact compared to other existing methods and has great potential in the fields of ultrafast all-optical signal processing.

We propose and investigate numerically a new kind of integrated optical waveguide coupler. Two waveguides with tilted Bragg gratings couple selectively to a discrete counter-propagating cladding mode which acts as an intermediary to transfer power between the waveguides. This gives a highly versatile platform that can act as a low-loss coupler with arbitrary coupling ratio between 0 and 100%, as a narrowbandwidth wavelength filter, and as a phase-selective switch that transmits two light waves of a fixed relative phase but reflects the orthogonal phase within a single device.

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The accepted industrial skills shortage in the subjects of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) in the United Kingdom has led to an increasing drive for universities to work with a wider pool of potential students. One contributor to this drive is the Lightwave Roadshow, a photonics-focused outreach program run by postgraduate students from the University of Southampton. The program has benefitted from the unique platform of the International Year of Light (IYL) 2015 for the development and support of hands-on and interactive outreach activities. In this report we review Lightwave activities facilitated by IYL that focused on widening participation for students aged 6 to 18 years from a multitude of societal categories; the roadshow has directly benefitted from the significance and investment into the IYL in conjunction with university recruitment strategies, local schools and the support of international organizations such as SPIE and OSA. Lightwave has used the foundation of the IYL to provide a wide range of activities for over 1,200 UK students in 53 different schools; the assessment tools used to measure learning outcomes, reach and impact are also discussed. The program's activities have been developed to make younger age groups the center of the outreach activity and create an environment which encourages youth pursuit of optics and science from a grassroots level upwards; to illustrate this we will outline a Lightwave project endorsed by the IYL steering committee to permit two 6 th form students to attend the IYL opening ceremony in Paris.