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10/10/2013 1:59:16 PM

Nano-scale artistic work – Ultra-fine 3D structures crafted by lasers

BY By Frank Kuo

Like 3D printing, nanoscale structures can be created by making a 2D slice at a time, and stacking slices together from bottom up carefully. A mature technology called laser direct writing (DLW) has been the workhouse in this field. Utilizing an ultrafast femto- or picosecond laser to induce multiphoton absorption of the photoresist in solution is the key principle (Figure 1, top). Since it is a multiphoton process, the polymerization will happen only at the focal point of the laser, even the focal point is embedded deep in the solution. With this “point construction capability”, you are actually free to build up any kind of structure. The resolution, or the pixel size (voxel) is defined by how tight you can focus the light beam.

10/10/2013 11:32:14 AM

Very Sensible Fiber

BY by Dominic Siriani

…perhaps the last bad title pun you’ll have to suffer for FiO/LS 2013. Today was the Symposium on Advanced Distributed Optical Fiber Sensor Systems. In a previous post, I wrote a little bit about these fiber sensors. In really brief review, they work on the principle that fibers scatter light (Rayleigh, Raman, Brillouin…), this scattering is sensitive to perturbations (stresses, heating…), and so changes in the scattered return signal translate to sensing an environmental change. So today I got a taste of a little bit more detail about the challenges and advances in the field.

10/9/2013 8:11:34 AM

A Day of Data

BY By Dominic Siriani

So it seems the theme of my day today was ways to address size and energy bottlenecks in data centers. I’ve thoroughly had it drilled into my head that the real scale of interest is on the interconnect level, between chips and even on chips. As pointed out in an excellent tutorial by David Miller of Stanford University, the parasitic capacitance of electronic lines results in a large energy consumption, in fact much larger than the logic operations being performed by the CMOS itself. So this is where photonics can really save the day.

10/9/2013 8:02:12 AM

Too fast to capture? Not a problem any more – Observing and controlling the electron dynamics using ultrafast X-ray and attosecond lasers

BY By Frank Kuo

An exciting technique generates shock waves and attracts followers. However, for a technique to actually fly high, it has to be applicable to exploring the scientific unknowns. The thirst of the unknown then feeds the desire of having even better techniques. This mutual and healthy interaction paves the way of scientific advance and can be seen in many of today’s technical sessions.

10/9/2013 7:43:50 AM

Ultracompact transparent conducting oxide and graphene based plasmonic modulator

BY by Howard Lee

Special guest post during FiO/LS 2013 from the Nanophotonics Technical Group To develop future hybrid photonic/plasmonic integrated nanocircuits, an efficient, ultracompact, ultrafast and low energy consumption modulator is one of the required components. Prof. Volker Sorger from the George Washington University presented a study on a transparent conducting oxide (TCO) based modulator. He showed that a silicon coupled TCO modulator achieves a modulation depth of 5dB and 20dB with a device length of 5um and 20um, respectively. The modulator has a broadband wavelength response (1.2um-2um) and can potentially be operated with high speed and low energy consumption (<100 fJ/bit).

10/8/2013 3:58:51 PM

Plasmonics for THz waves, a ultra-compact active platform.

BY By Zhimin Shi

Special guest post during FiO/LS 2013 from the Nanophotonics Technical Group Jerrett Vella from Wyle Aerospace group and AFRL introduced an ultracompact plasmonic modulator for Terahertz modulation, during which modulation up to 130 dB for the first time using a 15 um active area, which is 20 times smaller than the operation wavelength at 300 um.

10/8/2013 8:40:17 AM

And That’s Why It’s Not Called Sili-Can’t…

BY By Dom Siriani

It’s called silicon. Day two, pun two (a stretch, I know), and this is my second apology for the bad jokes. But, as before, I can justify it with a great theme: silicon and its continued expansion into the realm of photonics.

10/8/2013 8:35:31 AM

A 2013 Plenary Talk with a fine twist of history, technology, & encouraging perspective.

BY By Frank Kuo

Conference has limited amount of time for each call, so most of the technical talks are highly specialized. As a result, you need to be familiar with the topic or extremely sharp in picking up the ideas in order to grasp the content immediately. This is definitely not the case in Professor Murnane’s presentation. She started by carefully turning the clock back to the beginning for the century, revisited the idea behind the lasers proposed by Einstein (such as stimulated emission, population inversion), and naturally explained why table top X-ray laser is a challenging topic to tackle even today.

10/7/2013 2:56:17 PM

Silicon nanophotonics: the next wave for performance boost in long-haul/metro communications

BY by Zhimin Shi

Special guest post during FiO/LS 2013 from the Nanophotonics Technical Group Dr. Po Dong from Bell Labs / Alcatel-Lucent USA reported in an invited talk some latest results of high-speed silicon photonic integrated circuits for next generation coherent transmission. By integrating different but monolithically compatible materials (silicon, germanium, silicon-nitride and silicon oxide) on one single chip, Bell labs has managed to utilize the advantage of each material to realize various functionalities for encoding and decoding up to 224 Gbit per second on a single chip. For example, Dr. Dong commented that the uniqueness of silicon photonic platform (Silicon-nitride in particular) make polarization control possible on a chip which is difficult for other material platforms. Their solution also includes using germanium for photo-detection, silicon for routing and modulation, and oxide material for input/output coupling. In the device level, Dr. Gong used as an example that silicon micro-ring resonator structures can be used for both intensity and variable phase modulator. Using the Si-Ge-SiN monolithic integration platform, Bell labs has realized transmitting optical signals at 112 Gbit/s over 2500 km of single mode fibers with unprecedented performance. Some further performance challenge would include some low-voltage Silicon modulators with low insertion losses, high coupling efficiency mode converters, reliable high-speed Germanium photo detectors, etc.

10/7/2013 7:33:36 AM

Far from a Bohr (100 Years Even)

BY By Dom Siriani

Ok, right off the bat, sorry for the pun. Anyone could probably see it coming, but I couldn’t help myself. Frontiers in Optics/Laser Science 2013 opened in great style with the Symposium on the 100th Anniversary of the Bohr Atom. What does Bohr’s atom have to do with optics and lasers? Well, as anyone in the field could guess, quite a lot actually (where can’t photonics be applied?). The symposium opened with a great introduction by Charles Clark of NIST. Dr. Clark gave an overview of Neils Bohr’s seminal work, focusing on how his nearly parenthetical comment on applying quantization to the mechanical model of the angular momentum of atomic electrons provided a tremendous leap forward in the development of quantum mechanics. Although since proven to be an inadequate model, the elegance of Bohr’s idea is in its simplicity and yet remarkable accuracy in making predictions of the emission characteristics of atoms.

10/2/2013 1:26:43 PM

Communication via vortices?

BY Guest Blogger - Greg Gbur

Reposted from Skullinthestars.com This is the second in a series of posts about the upcoming OSA Frontiers in Optics meeting in Orlando. This post covers research related to the presentation FM3F.1: Alan E. Willner, Multiplexing Information-Carrying Orthogonal Beams using Orbital Angular Momentum States.

9/23/2013 10:35:11 AM

Distributed Sensing Using Optical Fiber

BY by Dominic Siriani

A special symposium on distributed optical fiber sensor systems will be held at this year’s FiO/LS meeting. These optical sensors can be much more robust than their electronic counterparts, for example being able to operate in areas with electronic interference. There are a number of different manifestations of distributed fiber optic sensors, but they primarily work on the same principle: scattering of an optical signal in fiber. The scattering can be due to defects in the fiber causing simple linear backscattering (Rayleigh scattering) or from nonlinear scattering due to phonon interactions (Brillouin scattering) or induced energy transitions in the material (Raman scattering). Here, I’ll focus on one sensor arrangement based on Rayleigh scattering and optical time domain reflectometry (OTDR).

9/12/2013 6:08:24 PM

Get Tuned Up for the FiO/LS 2013 Plenary

BY by Frank Kuo

Plenary sessions have been and will continuously to be the jewels of the FiO/LS conference. Each talk is extremely educational, inspirational, and highly praised. In addition to grabbing a precious seat or a corner of the room to stand because it’s usually packed, there are several things you need to do in order to get most out of the talks: you need to prepare yourself beforehand. In other words, tune your antenna to the right optics frequency.

9/4/2013 11:58:29 AM

Exploring Anderson Localization of Light

BY By Dominic Siriani

Over 50 years ago, P. W. Anderson first suggested that the diffusion of electrons can be frozen in a sufficiently disordered lattice. The backbone of the idea is in the quantum mechanical model of electron transport, in which the particles are also waves. As an intuitive explanation, one can consider the sum of the probability amplitudes of different paths the electron can take. The phases of these amplitudes must be taken into account, and as with all waves, constructive or destructive interference can occur. For a medium with strongly scattering disordered defects, the result of such interference can lead to the localization of the electron wavefunction in one place (i.e., diffusion is inhibited).

8/30/2013 4:57:09 PM

Networking Made Easy: From Nobel Laureates to Young Grasshoppers

BY Frank Kuo

While skimming the FiO conference agenda, the uniqueness of the conference jumped out at me. Unlike many other conferences, it covers various topics ranging from fundamental physics to applied technologies. This allows hardcore scientists and application engineers to find their corners of interest with great pleasure.

8/23/2013 2:49:11 PM

Supersymmetry in optics?

BY Guest Blogger - Greg Gbur

From the popular, Skulls in the Stars Blog.This is the first in a series of posts about the upcoming OSA Frontiers in Optics meeting in Orlando. This post covers research related to the presentation FM4C.5: Mohammad-Ali Miri; Matthias Heinrich; Demetrios N. Christodoulides, SUSY-generated complex optical potentials with real-valued spectra. One of the most fruitful strategies in optics research is to investigate the implications of concepts and mathematics used in seemingly very different fields of physics. The most dramatic example of this today is the foundation of the field of transformation optics, which uses the mathematical tools of general relativity to create novel optical devices. As I’ve discussed in previous posts, treating matter as an effective “warping” of space has led to the theoretical development of exotic objects such as invisibility cloaks, “perfect” optical illusions, and even optical wormholes.

8/19/2013 10:02:02 AM

Frontiers in Optics (FiO): The Must–Attend Meeting

BY FiO/LS Marketing

The FiO/LS Marketing team sat down with Nikola Alic , University of San Diego, Program Co-Chair, Frontiers in Optics 2013 to discuss some of the hot topics that will be featured at the conference and reasons why FiO is a leading international meeting in the filed of optics and laser science.

7/8/2013 9:39:44 AM

Trends in Optics in Information Processing - Interview with Frontiers in Optics Subcommittee Member

BY Daniel Marks, Duke University

The FiO/LS Marketing team sat down with Daniel Marks, Frontiers in Optics 2013 Subcommittee Member to discuss what type of exciting research can be anticipated this year under FiO 4 - Optics in Information Processing. Ghost imaging, Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Microscopy, and Pump-Probe Nonlinear Dispersion Phase Dispersion Spectroscopy are just a few of the trending topics discussed.

10/28/2012 7:37:41 PM

Endoscopy - focusing and depolarization

BY Sapna Shroff

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.

10/19/2012 11:06:57 AM

Amplifying Great Ideas into Amazing Scientific Achievements

BY Dominic Siriani

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.

10/18/2012 2:08:19 PM

In Search of Slow Darkness

BY Nicole Moore

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.

10/18/2012 8:28:37 AM

Integrated Photonics for Communications

BY Dom Siriani

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.

10/18/2012 8:22:39 AM

Clever Methods used in Poster Sessions

BY By Nicole Moore

Wednesday’s poster session had several interesting theoretical and computational posters, but I was unfortunately unable to speak with all of their authors.

10/17/2012 2:59:48 PM

The Eyes Say it All

BY Nicole Moore

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.

10/17/2012 12:53:44 PM

Rochester’s Rich History makes it a Fit Host for the Annual OSA Meeting

BY Colin McKinstrie and Donna Strickland, FiO 2012 General Chairs

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.

10/17/2012 12:31:14 PM

Omega and Omega EP, not the watches

BY Sapna Shroff

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.

10/17/2012 12:28:47 PM

Quiet Please

BY Nicole Moore

I had been looking forward to the session "Beyond Resolution," which took place in the late afternoon time slot on Tuesday.

10/16/2012 6:35:45 PM

Can I get a Ham & Cheese w/ my Partial Polarization?

BY Nicole Moore

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.

10/16/2012 6:33:42 PM

Lots of Silicon Photonics

BY Dom Siriani

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.

10/16/2012 8:42:49 AM

Consulting in Optics

BY Guest Blogger - Sapna Shroff

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!

10/15/2012 5:59:14 PM

Finally It’s FiO/LS Time

BY Dom Siriani

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.

10/15/2012 3:08:19 PM

Ives medal address--Marlan Scully

BY Nicole Moore

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.

10/14/2012 5:48:17 PM

Thoughts on the Special Symposium

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.

10/14/2012 11:02:12 AM

Welcome Newcomers!

BY Amy Sullivan

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.

10/14/2012 10:25:31 AM

Off to Rochester!

BY Sapna Shroff

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! :)

10/9/2012 5:21:36 PM

Attending Frontiers in Optics: In person or virtually

BY By Amy Sullivan, Laser Mom

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:

10/8/2012 6:07:10 PM

Get Connected - What to Know about WiFi Access at FiO/LS 2012

BY Nicole Moore

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.

9/26/2012 1:45:59 PM

Undergraduate Research

BY Dom Siriani

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.

9/13/2012 5:46:20 PM

Where to Eat

BY Nicole Moore

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.

9/4/2012 10:34:11 AM

Video Highlights

BY Amy Sullivan

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.

8/27/2012 8:19:09 AM

Plan Your FiO/LS Week

BY Dom Siriani

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.

8/20/2012 9:59:39 AM

Looking forward to the plenaries (Part II)

BY Nicole Moore

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.

8/14/2012 11:24:04 AM

Curiosity

BY Amy Sullivan, Laser Mom

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?”

8/9/2012 6:41:10 PM

Photonic Crystals Twenty-Five Years After a Seminal Paper

BY Dom Siriani

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.

8/2/2012 10:20:24 AM

Looking forward to the Plenary (Part I)

BY Nicole Moore

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.

7/26/2012 1:21:37 PM

A First Glance at FiO: A Powerhouse of a Symposium

BY Dom Siriani

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.”

7/16/2012 3:32:05 PM

Undergraduates and the Future of Optics

BY Laser Mom

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.

6/25/2012 2:12:54 PM

Baby Vision Research

BY Laser Mom

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.

6/24/2012 12:03:39 PM

Rochester, NY, USA – Where it All Began!

BY Dominique Smith

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.