By Frank Kuo | Posted: 15 November 2011
Various forms of metamaterial have generated a lot of scientific attention in the past few decades. Some exciting “potential” applications include the well-publicized invisibility cloak (Thanks to Harry Potter). As you may know already, metamaterial gains its bizarre optical property (such as negative index of refraction) by its internal composition or structure, rather than its original physical property. Most metamaterial has its magic only in specific wavelength region and this wavelength region is correlated to how small you can make the internal structures of the metamaterial. This is exactly why almost all the research on metamaterial focuses on THz region since THz has very long wavelength and we do not need to make the structures awfully small to concoct the magic (I did read some articles about “universal metamaterials”, but it seems a long way to go. Let’s dream of that coming in CLEO 2012).
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By James Van Howe | Posted: 22 October 2011
Professor Mathias Fink from ESPCI ParisTech and Institut Langevin doesn’t fit the typical profile for a plenary speaker at an optics conference, which is precisely why why you won’t want to miss his plenary talk at CLEO 2012 this May. Though acoustics is the consistent medium for his work, his research more broadly consists of understanding the nature of waves and how to get around the limits assumed by our conventional understanding, such as diffraction-limited focusing and imaging. Much of professor Fink’s work since the late 1990′s has been using time-reversal, the subject of his upcoming plenary talk, to achieve these ends.
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By James Van Howe | Posted: 3 October 2011
Research performed in the Ozcan group at UCLA holds a unique place in the field of optics and photonics. Besides the typical pursuit of advancing optical technology, another major initiative of this photonics group is solving problems of global world health, particularly in resource-poor countries.
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By Frank Kuo | Posted: 10 September 2011
Microscope, one of the most popular optical instruments, has been paving the way of biological science for the past three hundred years. With the aid of the microscope, detailed observations of sub-cell size resolution were made possible. This, in turn, accelerated our understanding of the biology in an unprecedented way. Three hundred years have passed; we now arrived at a new cross road — While triumphing on the universe of biology, a desire to develop microscopes with specificities and better resolutions is creating another revolution.
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By James Van Howe | Posted: 17 August 2011
This year may not be a flush for the market but it is looking good for plasmonics. Expansion of the the work shown in CLEO 2011, Postdeadline paper “Nanoantenna-enhanced gas sensing in a single tailored nanofocus,” from Na Liu et al. just took the August cover of Nature Materials. Additionally, plasmonics has had a solid recent run of the main-stream physics circuit after the publication of two Physics Today articles earlier this year in February and July.
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By Frank Kuo | Posted: 30 July 2011
Do not get me wrong; evolution is an expert of all physical science. But it intimately links nature to optical science without doubt — from cyanobacteria that have been converting solar energy to chemical energy for 3 billion years to human beings who rely on vision for surviving.
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By James Van Howe | Posted: 14 July 2011
This summer seems to be marked by a frenzy of solar energy initiatives and development. The Business News section in the May issue of Nature Photonics reported on four recent major investments in solar technology manufacturing: JA Solar of Shanghai plans to build a 3 GW capacity plant in Hefei, China for the manufacturing of monocrystalline silicon solar cells. Investors have pledged $2.05 billion over the next four years, and production is slated to begin in 2012. Polysilicon Technology Company, a joint venture between Mutajadedah Energy of Saudi Arabia, and KCC Corporation of Seoul will build a $1.5 billion facility to produce solar-grade polysilicon in Jubail, Saudi Arabia by 2017. The Indian government is discussing a joint venture with nanotech company, Rusanano, of Moscow to obtain a consistent supply of silicon for Indian photovoltaic manufacturers with hopes of obtaining 2,000 tons of silicon ingots for solar cell production. And SoloPower of San Jose was guaranteed $197 million from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to build a plant in Oregon for the manufacturing of flexible copper-indium-gallium diselenide (CIGS) for light-weight solar panels.
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By Frank Kuo | Posted: 28 June 2011
Recently, three-dimensional plasmon rulers based on nano-rods are reported on Science. Hopefully, it will be cool weaponry for measuring the structures of the molecules in the near future. Over the past few decades, optical rulers based on different principles emerged from various branches of optical science. At the same time, researchers are trying hard to push each methodology to the limit. Optical Rulers, as a result, attract an army of researchers and spin off fruitful results. A quick summary of them seems to be a fair amount of content for everyone
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By James Van Howe | Posted: 12 May 2011
On Thursday May 5th, a number of the conference attendees took a bus to Washington D.C. to visit the offices of various members of congress and senators of our respective legislative districts and states. Our goal was to help defend science funding levels in the wake of strong national sentiment to reduce U.S. federal spending.
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By Frank Kuo | Posted: 10 May 2011
Just like the movie slogan, “everything that has a beginning has an end” (I should reverse this to make it more suitable for this short blog). Everything that has a terrific end has a new exciting beginning. Indeed, something electrifying is happening across the Atlantic. Every two year, CLEO/Europe EQEC 2011 (22-26 May, Germany) is taking the heat to Europe and once again is looking forward to resonating what we have just completed in CLEO.
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