The FiO Blog - Luminous Insights
Hey folks..
Multimode fibers are great for endoscopy type scanning applications. But a beam focused at a multimode fiber generates a scrambled random speckle pattern at the output, with the fiber acting like a turbid medium. Digital phase conjugation can be used to suppress this speckle.
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Posted: 10/28/2012 7:37:41 PM by
Sapna Shroff | with 0 comments
Well, we’ve now reached the end of a great week at the FiO/LS conference. It’s been a great week, and this final day was no exception to that. Unfortunately, I had an early flight out and so only could attend a half-day of the talks. However, not surprisingly, the ones I did get to see where very good.
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Posted: 10/19/2012 11:06:57 AM by
Dominic Siriani | with 0 comments
Today, there are three sections of "General Optical Sciences," which is often my home when giving a talk. I find these sessions to be a lot of fun because the topics of the talks are mixed, so you can learn about a lot of different types of ideas in a single session.
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Posted: 10/18/2012 2:08:19 PM by
Nicole Moore | with 0 comments
Much like yesterday, today my FiO/LS presentation selection seemed to have a theme. This time it was integrated photonics for the use in optical communications. It seems natural to have a large focus in this area, since it repeatedly is shown how the energy and cost per bit/sec must be reduced in order to keep up with consumer demand. It’s really remarkable how quickly user consumption on the internet has increased over a relatively short amount of time (think of how prominent video on demand has become in just a few years), and this poses significant challenges for developing the next generation of photonic devices and data transmission methodologies.
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Posted: 10/18/2012 8:28:37 AM by
Dom Siriani | with 0 comments
Wednesday’s poster session had several interesting theoretical and computational posters, but I was unfortunately unable to speak with all of their authors.
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Posted: 10/18/2012 8:22:39 AM by
By Nicole Moore | with 0 comments
This morning I took a break from my usual sort of sessions and attended the Symposium on Understanding the Developing and Aging Visual Systems. I am glad that I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about vision in the past few years (both due to curiosity on my part and a desire to be able to field student questions correctly) or I may have found parts of the talks to be impenetrable due to specialized terminology.
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Posted: 10/17/2012 2:59:48 PM by
Nicole Moore | with 0 comments
This week, the members of the Optical Society (OSA) will come together for Frontiers in Optics (FiO), OSA’s 96th Annual Meeting, in the very birthplace of the industry - Rochester, New York. The city is home to many of the cutting-edge companies that will showcase their products and technologies, as well as two of the leading educational institutions where science and entrepreneurship coalesce to move optics forward. So it is with a sense of that history that we come together in Rochester, the city where the Optical Society was founded in 1916, and where technology continues to thrive.
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Posted: 10/17/2012 12:53:44 PM by
Colin McKinstrie and Donna Strickland, FiO 2012 General Chairs | with 0 comments
Hey everyone.. Monday afternoon I joined a guided tour of the Laboratory for Laser Energetics at University of Rochester. It was organized by UoR/LLE and the Optical Society of America.
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Posted: 10/17/2012 12:31:14 PM by
Sapna Shroff | with 0 comments
I had been looking forward to the session "Beyond Resolution," which took place in the late afternoon time slot on Tuesday.
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Posted: 10/17/2012 12:28:47 PM by
Nicole Moore | with 0 comments
This morning I attended a packed session called "Optical Design and Unconventional Polarization I" since I have been interested in radial and azimuthal polarization states for quite some time. I was able to hear numerous talks dealing not only with those polarization states, but also several even less conventional states.
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Posted: 10/16/2012 6:35:45 PM by
Nicole Moore | with 0 comments
So my day two at FiO/LS had a general theme of silicon photonics. This looks like a very promising technology for photonic integrated circuits (PICs) and other integrated photonics, so it’s no wonder there were many talks on the topic. I found all of them very interesting and informative, and I learned a lot about the state-of-the-art, the different device manifestations, and the motivations and future prospects.
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Posted: 10/16/2012 6:33:42 PM by
Dom Siriani | with 0 comments
Hey everybody.. Today I attended the Minorities and Women in OSA meeting at Frontiers in Optics. They had organized a talk by Jennifer Kruschwitz on consulting as a career. Jennifer is always positive and fun to meet.. so it was a great to have her for the early morning breakfast event!
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Posted: 10/16/2012 8:42:49 AM by
Guest Blogger - Sapna Shroff | with 0 comments
So FiO/LS is finally in full swing here in Rochester, NY. I had hoped to have something to talk about yesterday, but my flights were delayed and I got in too late. Consequently, I missed the special symposium for Emil Wolf’s 90th birthday, which had been one of the sessions I was very eager to see. Hopefully, I’ll be able to see the presentations through the media the organizers are posting online, or at least I can talk to some of my earlier-arriving colleagues about the session.
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Posted: 10/15/2012 5:59:14 PM by
Dom Siriani | with 0 comments
Today, Marlan O. Scully accepted the Frederic Ives Medal/Jarus W. Quinn Prize and gave the Ives Medal address. This talk introduced me to a variety of really fascinating work in the field of quantum thermodynamics.
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Posted: 10/15/2012 3:08:19 PM by
Nicole Moore | with 0 comments
I hope you were among the many attendees at the special symposium about the future of optics in honor of Emil Wolf's 90th birthday. If you missed it, you missed a very lovely booklet of remembrances from some of his former students and colleagues and four fun talks about the future of optics.
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Posted: 10/14/2012 5:48:17 PM by
Nicole Moore | with 0 comments
This post is mostly for new conference attendees, but for those of you who are veterans of the conference, this is a reminder for you to do your best to make these newcomers welcome. This is your community and it is your responsibility to make it a friendly and welcoming one.
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Posted: 10/14/2012 11:02:12 AM by
Amy Sullivan | with 0 comments
Hey everybody..
It's Frontiers in Optics time again and I'm off to Rochester tomorrow! It'll be my first visit since graduation! Some of my best friendships and memories are from Rochester. I get to meet a lot of the folks at meetings and conferences. Some of my Rochester friends also work in the Bay area. But it's after a long time I'm going to go to the University, see my old offices and labs again.. meet everyone again! :)
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Posted: 10/14/2012 10:25:31 AM by
Sapna Shroff | with 0 comments
Are you excited about heading to Rochester? Frontiers in Optics is less than 1 week away!
It’s funny – I must be honest and tell you that I usually complain about this conference being in Rochester and wish that it were somewhere more interesting. I often tell students that it is held there so that there will not be any motivation to skip sessions. Because, really, if the conference is on a sunny beach, who wants to be in a cold, air conditioned conference room?
But Rochester is quite beautiful in the fall. I brought a group of students a couple of years ago, and enjoyed a quiet walk along the river one afternoon:
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Posted: 10/9/2012 5:21:36 PM by
By Amy Sullivan, Laser Mom | with 0 comments
By quickly browsing the conference hotels' websites, it appears that we should have greater access to free wifi (especially in the lobbies) than we have sometimes had in the past. The Hyatt apparently still charges $9.99/day for Internet access from the guest rooms. I will almost definitely end up paying for it since I need to be in touch with my students while I'm away.
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Posted: 10/8/2012 6:07:10 PM by
Nicole Moore | with 0 comments
My scientific research experience began as an undergraduate student after I was encouraged to pursue the opportunity by my academic adviser. I contacted a few professors who were working on topics that sounded interesting to me, and a short time later I began working for my permanent research adviser. That undergraduate experience provided me the opportunity to explore several different topics without being tied to a single project, gave me a glimpse into graduate life, and exposed me to the excitement of novel scientific discovery. Looking back on that time, it’s entirely likely that without taking that first step into research, I would have ended up with an entirely different career that I wouldn’t be nearly as passionate about.
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Posted: 9/26/2012 1:45:59 PM by
Dom Siriani | with 0 comments
Even when I lived in Rochester, I was a little stumped about where to eat near the convention center. Here’s a list of places I like or am planning to try this year that are located near the convention center, including some thoughts.
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Posted: 9/13/2012 5:46:20 PM by
Nicole Moore | with 0 comments
Every year, the chairs for Frontiers in Optics record short videos discussing what they consider to be the highlights of their sessions. While many people these days prefer videos to reading the content, I am not a video person myself. With a baby at home, all my work is done out at a coffee shop or at the library or in a shared office (or while she is sleeping) and I somehow always forget my headphones.
For those of you who also prefer the written word, here are some summaries of the highlights that I listened to – there are many videos for the different sessions and I have only listened to a few so far.
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Posted: 9/4/2012 10:34:11 AM by
Amy Sullivan | with 0 comments
I recently noticed that the Frontiers in Optics/Laser Science conference program is now posted online. It’s nice to be able to peruse the conference talks before arriving at the conference. As is usual, you can browse all the sessions and presentations day-by-day and hour-by-hour to sift through and find what you might be interested in attending. However, the organizers have added a couple nice additional features that I don’t believe I’ve ever seen before.
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Posted: 8/27/2012 8:19:09 AM by
Dom Siriani | with 0 comments
Previously, I described some of the reasons that I am particularly looking forward to the plenary talk to be given by David Williams. Today, I plan to discuss why I’m looking forward to that of Paul Corkum.
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Posted: 8/20/2012 9:59:39 AM by
Nicole Moore | with 0 comments
A few weeks ago, when the first news on the Higgs boson came out, a friend of mine sent me an email requesting that I write a blog entry explaining what it’s all about (that blog entry will be coming next week on Laser Mom). He said that understanding this part of physics was hard for him as an engineer since he did not have much background in modern physics. He also asked, “Why do we care about what gives us our mass?”
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Posted: 8/14/2012 11:24:04 AM by
Amy Sullivan, Laser Mom | with 0 comments
Twenty-five years ago, Eli Yablonovitch wrote a remarkably influential journal letter on “Inhibited Spontaneous Emission in Solid-State Physics and Electronics” (Phys. Rev. Lett., 58, 2059, 1987). In this manuscript, he described how a periodic three-dimensional dielectric structure would produce an electromagnetic band gap that, when properly designed, could significantly reduce unwanted spontaneous emission in some of the most technologically fundamental electronic and photonic devices, viz. semiconductor lasers, bipolar transistors, and solar cells. What perhaps couldn’t be foreseen at the time is the remarkable innovation this paper would lead to, as the structure he described (which became known as a photonic crystal) turned into a focus of research for nearly everything related to controlling light.
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Posted: 8/9/2012 6:41:10 PM by
Dom Siriani | with 0 comments
The plenary speakers this year at FiO are David Williams and Paul Corkum. Today, I want to discuss why I’m particularly excited to hear David William’s talk on the morning of Monday, October 15. (We’ll get to Paul Corkum’s talk in a bit.)
I obtained my PhD at the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester, where David Williams is the William G. Allyn Professor of Medical Optics. While I was there, I had the pleasure of hearing talks by several of his students in a variety of venues including FiO 2008. All of their individual work has been extremely interesting, so I expect the overview and synthesis of those individual strains of research (and perhaps others) is likely to be captivating.
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Posted: 8/2/2012 10:20:24 AM by
Nicole Moore | with 0 comments
I’m very excited to be attending this year’s Frontiers in Optics. Not only do I get to reunite with many amazing friends and colleagues, but I also anticipate seeing some excellent presentations. I’ve already started perusing the conference program and was very pleased to see that one of the special symposia is “The Future of Optics: A Perspective at Emil Wolf’s 90th Birthday.”
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Posted: 7/26/2012 1:21:37 PM by
Dom Siriani | with 0 comments
Having found some time to myself again after a few long weeks, I decided to do some more exploring on the Frontiers in Optics website. While the full conference program will not be up for some time, there are tons of exciting invited speakers and special symposia listed for the conference. I am going to have a hard time deciding what things to go to with so much going on – one of the big challenges of the big conferences with so many concurrent sessions.
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Posted: 7/16/2012 3:32:05 PM by
Laser Mom | with 0 comments
The research on infant vision is really amazing. Rowan Candy’s group looks at eye movements and the electrical activity in the brain in infants to study the difference between normal and abnormal eye development. Eye tracking and brain imaging using near infrared light help Richard Aslin’s group learn how infants use visual cues in their learning and development.
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Posted: 6/25/2012 2:12:54 PM by
Laser Mom | with 0 comments
If you are in the optics field, you probably already know that Rochester is known as the world capital of imaging. This is due to the high dominance of imaging and optical science among area industries and universities. The Institute of Optics of the University of Rochester and the Rochester Institute of Technology in nearby Henrietta both have distinguished imaging programs. Many of the best and brightest leaders in optics have been products of these programs.
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Posted: 6/24/2012 12:03:39 PM by
Dominique Smith | with 0 comments