Thoughts on the Special Symposium

by Nicole Moore

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Written by Nicole Moore

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.
 
I was personally delighted to hear a talk by Anthony Devaney, in part because I am a frequent citer of a paper that he and Emil Wolf wrote.  His talk focused on inverse scattering problems; unfortunately he ran a little short of time to talk about the future, but the generalization to coherent x-ray tomography will be a very exciting and important future contribution.
 
Then, Wayne Knox gave a fascinating talk about the future of vision. I was particularly captivated by the discussion of the possibility of creating index changes in the cornea in lieu of LASIK, but the progress toward improvements in intra-ocular lenses is also quite interesting and impressive.
 
Peter Milonni spoke to us about the future of coherence and quantum optics. He provided us with a thoughtful discussion about the integration of quantum optics with other fields, on-chip or "circuit" QED, and about progress and questions in quantum information science. I am intrigued by his discussion of quantum optomechanics and I will definitely be doing a literature search to learn more about the current state of the art.
 
Lastly, we heard from Lukas Novotny, who as always was a delightful speaker, about near-field coherence. He also discussed the recent paper about the direct measurement of the spatial coherence by a group in Israel and related efforts by his group in Switzerland.
 

Posted: 14 Oct 2012 by Nicole Moore