| The Nobel Laureate Plenary Talk |
Tuesday at FiO + LS marks the opening of the Science + Industry Showcase — where you can meet exhibitors, connect with other attendees in the OSA Member Zone or Networking Zone or take in up to six show-floor programs, including a plenary talk given by Nobel Laureate Donna Strickland (pictured).
Two Visionary Speakers present: Mohan Trivedi on the vision, illusion and realization of autonomous vehicles, and Jelena Vuckovic on optimized (quantum) photonics.
Finally, seven special events are scheduled. You had the opportunity to meet with OSA's Journal editors yesterday. Now meet the APS Physical Review Journal Editors at an afternoon reception. And keep some energy in reserve as the day concludes with the conference reception. |
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| Jeremy J Baumberg, University of Cambridge, UK |
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Light Confinement Gets Extreme
Just how “small” can light get? The disciplines of plasmonics and nanophotonics are all about the field enhancements and unusual behaviors obtained from squeezing light into tiny, subwavelength-scale spaces. In an enthusiastic and wide-ranging Visionary Speakers presentation at Monday’s FiO + LS conference, a leader in the field, Jeremy Baumberg of the University of Cambridge, UK, shared work by his team that has taken these techniques to the next level, and explored the bizarre world of light confinement at the sub-nanometer scale—an emerging area that he calls “extreme picophotonics.”
While driven by the desire to take light confinement to ever-smaller places, Baumberg is also mindful of the need to do so in scalable ways that can lead to practical devices and applications. Unfortunately, conventional lithography, the workhorse technique in electronics fabrication, is of little help in tackling this problem — and that has led Baumberg’s group to look at a variety of creative alternatives. These range from self-assembly techniques; to clever approaches for “gluing” metallic nanoparticles at a fixed distance; to the use of “DNA origami” to create custom structures and configurations of light-confining nanoparticles and light-emitting dye molecules that can drive new kinds of experiments.
By allowing light confinement at unprecedentedly small scales, according to Baumberg, the work is expanding the frontiers of real-time chemistry. “You’re starting to watch a single [chemical] bond in time,” he said, “as it fluctuates and sees its environment.”
Read extended coverage from OSA's Optics & Photonics News. > |
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FiO + LS from Outer Space to Inner Space
Monday morning’s FiO + LS session, Optical Telescope and Microscope Instruments, presented intriguing new developments in the quests to image individual cells inside the human body and detect Earth-like planets in orbit around distant stars.
Scott Will, University of Rochester, USA, explained some of the challenges in designing instrumentation for the Large UV/Optical/IR Surveyor (LUVOIR), a concept by NASA for a multi-wavelength space observatory capable of imaging faint, terrestrial-size planets around blazingly bright stars. To achieve this incredibly difficult task, the telescope has to compensate for the differences in brightness between the planet and its host star, then remove polarization aberrations, which manifest as wavefront aberrations, by using a single wavefront-correction system.
On the other end of the scale, Cristina Canavesi from LighTopTech Corp., USA, presented a novel optical biopsy imaging technique called Gabor-Domain Optical Coherence Microscopy (GDOCM), which can resolve individual cells in 3D, in vivo, and in real time. In addition to the system’s structural-imaging capability, machine-learning techniques allow it to automatically determine things like cell density and nanoscale thickness of tissue, at clinically relevant depths. With no moving microscope parts and a liquid lens, the researchers can dynamically refocus the probe light at different depths inside tissue, achieving 2-micron resolution.
Craig Copeland wrapped up the session by presenting how he and his colleagues at the U.S. National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) are developing reference materials and methods for the calibration of optical microscopy. His analogy is that even if you get a tight grouping of arrows on a target, you also need to get them near the bullseye. Both precision and accuracy, in archery as well as microscopy, are essential. |
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| Alexis Debray, Yole Développement, France |
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Sizing Up Markets for Autonomous Systems
In a Monday-morning session at the FiO + LS conference, representatives from a market-research firm and an autonomous-systems trade organization offered differing perspectives on the emerging markets for such systems. The two talks agreed on one thing, however: There’s a lot of potential growth out there.
One speaker, Alexis Debray, from the semiconductor technology market-intelligence firm Yole Développement, Lyon, France, addressed the market for optical sensors in autonomous vehicles. Debray touched on four macro-trends in the car business—vehicle electrification, ridesharing, connectivity, and active-safety systems—that are combining to drive forward autonomous-vehicle adoption. He then looked at the market for optical sensors system by system, envisioning five-year compound annual growth ranging from a blistering 64 percent for Lidar (which Yole believes could be a US$4.2 billion market by 2024) to a more muted 16 percent annual growth rate for visible-light cameras.
The second speaker, David Klein, with the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems Inc., USA, took a more qualitative and broader look at the market for autonomous systems. He focused especially on aerial drones and other “air domain” autonomous vehicles—for which, he noted, more than 80 percent of all patents issued have been captured in only the last three years. But while Klein envisions smart growth across a wide variety of unmanned-vehicle platforms, the impact of that growth on the optical sensor market will vary significantly from application to application.
For more on the session, see the story in OSA’s Optics & Photonics News >. |
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| Isaiah Hankel, Cheeky Scientist, USA |
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Applying Your PhD to Industry
In a special professional-development seminar at FiO+LS, author, CEO and career consultant Isaiah Hankel spoke about the limitless career options for STEM PhDs.
Hankel, who is the founder of Cheeky Scientist — a job-search training platform for PhDs who are transitioning into industry — shared tips, tricks and secrets about scientific industry careers with a standing-room-only audience of students and early-career professionals.
“Most of you will go outside of academia for a job,” began Hankel. “The question is, how long will it take you to realize that?” He followed this powerful introduction with a series of surprising statistics. For example, according to The Atlantic, 60 percent of all PhDs will be unemployed at some point. And only 2 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs have doctorates — Hankel wants to see that number rise.
The reason for these numbers, according to Hankel, is that most students get tunnel vision and drive full-steam ahead into academia, but there aren’t nearly as many attractive academic positions as there are qualified PhDs. In fact, based on the decreasing number of tenure-track positions and a rise in adjunct positions, Hankel predicts that in 20 years, full-time professorships will be extinct.
For this reason, among others, Hankel believes that students should take a more holistic view when approaching their job search and cast a wider net. “Dig into the data” when researching postdoc positions, he advised. “Postdoc positions were never meant to be a holding pattern for PhDs after they graduate,” Hankel said, “so don’t chase postdoc after postdoc — it can actually damage your career.”
OSA has partnered with Cheeky Scientist to provide free online training materials and other professional-development resources through OSA’s Career Calibrator.
For more details on this talk, read the story in OSA’s Optics & Photonics News >. |
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Don't Miss the Showcase —
Where Science + Applications Intersect.
frontiersinoptics.org
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Technical Conference
15 – 19 September 2019
Science + Industry Showcase
17 – 18 September 2019
Marriott Wardman Park
2660 Woodley Road, NW
Washington, DC 20008
USA
Map & Directions |
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Registration
Atrium (Lower Level)
Tuesday, 17 September
07:30 – 18:00
Wednesday, 18 September
07:30 – 17:30
Thursday, 19 September
07:30 – 11:00 |
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Science + Industry Showcase
Hall B and C South (Lower Level)
Tuesday, 17 September
10:00 – 15:30
Wednesday, 18 September
10:00 – 15:30 |
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Complimentary WiFi Access
SSID: Marriott Conference
Password: FIOLS2019 |
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For More Information
Visit the FiO + LS website for up-to-date meeting information, or contact us at custserv@osa.org.
You can also visit the onsite OSA Booth located near Registration (Atrium, Lower Level). |
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Sponsored by: |
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Managed by:
The Optical Society
2010 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, D.C., 20036
USA
osa.org |
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