By Lynn Savage
You can tell when CLEO is just around the corner when the Hollywood blockbusters start to arrive. Back in the heyday of drive-in theaters, the summer movie season started after Memorial Day, the unofficial dawn of the vacation season. But when the era of the summer blockbuster began in the 1970s – with movies like Jaws and, especially, Star Wars – the release date of so-called “tent-pole” flicks crept up earlier and earlier. The release of Star Wars in mid-May cemented the practice of pushing big-budget films upon an eagerly primed audience.
This year’s preordained blockbuster, of course, is Avengers: Age of Ultron from Marvel Studios. Some of you undoubtedly were fans of the comics when that inspired the recent surge in superheroic action films, and perhaps still are (count me in). Even if you weren’t, the films leading up to and including Age of Ultron havecaptured the imagination of thousands of non-comics fans. The filmmakers have accomplished this by generating excitement through the gradual introduction of the disparate heroes and their unique gifts, letting audiences pick their favorite(s), then bringing the lone vigilantes together to interact with each other and achieve greater victories together than they could alone.
Sounds like CLEO to me.
There are other groups of heroes besides the Avengers, just as there are other photonics conferences besides CLEO. But the Avengers are known as “Earth’s Mightiest Heroes” in every medium and, likewise, the talent on hand for CLEO’s exciting and informative symposia are the best representatives of their fields.
Another hallmark of superhero teams is that their publishers know to stock them with fan favorite characters. In this spirit, the Optical Society has, for the first time ever, let the photonics community select the 2015 symposia topics. The photonics community has done a splendid job, I must say, in its selections — and the OSA responded by choosing leaders in each area to chair each symposium who in turn found groundbreaking researchers to showcase their work.
The 2015 CLEO symposia include:
Advanced Optical Microscopy for Brain Imaging
Modern neuroscience requires non-invasive imaging techniques that provide high spatial resolution. If one can clearly see individual neurons and neuronal processes inside the brain, then one can monitor and perhaps even manipulate the activity of damaged or diseased brains. Organized by Na Ji of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Chris Xu of Cornell University, Advanced Optical Microscopy for Brain Imaging will highlight the most recent advances in optical microscopy methods and technologies useful to neuroscience research while also defining some of the major challenges remaining in optical imaging of the brain.
Breaking Limits with Unconventional Optical Fields
Recently there is an increasing interest in utilizing unconventional optical fields — those with spatially variant amplitude, phase or polarization within the cross-section of a light beam. Added degrees of freedom arising from diverse amplitude, phase and polarization enables researchers and engineers alike to push the boundaries in many photonics fields. Organized by Qiwen Zhan of the University of Dayton and Uriel Levy of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, this symposium will explore how unconventional optical fields are generated, characterized, manipulated, propagated, and used in various applications, such as microscopy, micro- and nano-scale engineering, optical confinement, and more.
Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics (CQED)
Using emitters such as quantum dots inside photonic crystals, optical fibers, and other structures where an electromagnetic field can be closely confined offers a wealth of potential in the field of quantum theory and measurement, and could lead to advances in quantum communication and computing. The field is very young, however, and this symposium provides a rare opportunity for practitioners to put their heads together. Organized by France’s Alexia Auffèves of CNRS and Pascale Senellart of CNRS-Laboratoire Photonique et Nanostrutures and Glenn Solomon of the U.S. Joint Quantum Institute.
OPA/OPCPA – Next Generation of Ultra-Short Pulse Laser Technology
Just as some engineers continually seek to bump processing speeds to dazzling new heights, others strive to reduce the span of laser pulses past the modern picosecond range. Titanium-doped sapphire has been the (ahem) gold standard thus far in achieving femtosecond and attosecond limits. To push past this realm, however, new materials or techniques must be considered. According to organizers Dong Eon Kim of the Pohang University of Science & Technology in South Korea, Thomas Metzger of TRUMPF Scientific Lasers GmbH in Germany and Albert Stolow of Canada’s National Research Council, optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA) systems have been the only way thus far to generate high-energy few-cycle coherent light pulses above the millijoule level, and the way to achieve short-pulse-pumped OPCPAs as high harmonic driver sources are picosecond lasers with kilohertz repetition rates, high pulse energies and high average powers.
Remote Atmospheric Lasing
Generating population inversion remotely through the atmosphere — a technique called air lasing — has the potential to greatly improve remote-sensing applications. According to symposium leaders Andrius Baltuska of the Technische Universität Wien in Austria, Ya Cheng of the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics in China, and Pavel Polynkin of the University of Arizona, the technique involves a complex interplay between atomic and molecular effects driven by intense laser fields. Air lasing research involves searching for insights into femtosecond laser filamentation, strong-field molecular physics, and ultrafast nonlinear spectroscopy.
Science and Technology of Laser Three Dimensional Printing
Three-dimensional printing is sparking the public imagination already, but there is much left to discover. Lasers and optics play a key role in 3-D printing, which can be used to form parts large and small from an assortment of polymers, sculpting useful items from powderized plastic or metals. There are fundamental and technological issues that must be addressed so as to improve the lasers and optics used in these systems. The organizers are Yves Bellouard of Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, Saulius Juodkazis of Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, and Timo Mappes of Carl Zeiss AG in Germany.
Single-Photon Nonlinear Optics
Nonlinearity becomes very dicey when single-photon transmission is involved, yet solving the inherent issues of low-power systems would have tremendous benefits, especially in the field of quantum and classical information processing. There have been a few recent advances obtaining strong nonlinear interactions at very low optical powers, using physical systems ranging from high-finesse optical cavities, Rydberg atoms, and nanostructured materials such as graphene, but there is more work to be done. The end result could be advances in quantum information processing, all-optical switching, and other cutting-edge technologies. The organizers are Alexey Akimov of the Russian Quantum Center, Sergey Polyakov of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and Alexander Szameit of Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena in Germany.
Submit your topics for CLEO 2016 by June 9, 2015 for consideration.
Posted: 9 May 2015 by
Lynn Savage
| with 0 comments