Dr. Ronald Holzwarth is managing director and CTO at MENLO and one of its co-founders. He obtained his PhD in 2001 from the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich for his work on optical frequency combs in the group of Prof. T.W. Hänsch. In the last 20 years Ronald has built up the company with the goal of commercializing the frequency comb technology invented during his PhD thesis. Over the years the portfolio has widened and new applications and products have been added. Today Dr Holzwarth is overseeing Menlo's R&D and product development activities. He is author or co-author more than 130 papers, and holds 12 patents.

Today Frequency Combs are a mature technology, mature enough to be engineered for space applications and other applications outside the classical laboratory.

The presentation will start with a review on available technologies. Mode locked femtosecond lasers are today's work horse but micro resonator based combs that are generated via cascaded four wave mixing are gaining more and more attention. Considerations on size, weight and power as well as on radiation sensitivity and environmental conditions will be presented.

Then two main applications will be looked at: The calibration of astronomical spectrographs enabling the search for extra solar earth like planets and the use of frequency combs as clock work and frequency converter for the next generation of space grade optical clocks for GNSS applications.