By James Van Howe | Posted: 9 May 2011
Brian Kolner and Moshe Nazarathy coined the word “time-lens” in 1989 after using one to compress a pulse. They made a system in the time-domain that was a complete analog to a lens system in space. Their time-lens took a fat pulse and “focused” it, just like a spatial lens could take a fat beam and focus it to a smaller size. For more details, see Kolner’s well-written 1994 review on space-time duality and van Howe and Xu’s 2006 review on temporal-imaging devices).
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By James Van Howe | Posted: 9 May 2011
I hope this post greets everyone safe and cozy at home, resting from a week packed of optics innovation. I am still catching my breath. There was just so much. I would have liked to have attended many more talks, visited more booths at the expo, met up with more colleagues, and posted more (I still might on the latter- it turns out, for better or worse, Newton’s First Law applies to blogs as well). Harold Metcalf was correct is is pre-CLEO analysis “Looking over the program and the titles of the sessions, I feel like a kid in a candy store- with unlimited funds, but limited time. It’s impossible to do everything.”
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By Frank Kuo | Posted: 6 May 2011
Just want to touch a few more fields before we wrap up this amazing CLEO 2011. The truth is, we all learn a lot and we will crave for more soon.
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By James Van Howe | Posted: 6 May 2011
On Tuesday, May 3, I sat in on part of the Market Focus talks at the CLEO expo on defense. The Market Focus sessions cover various business and commercial applications of optics research. Last year was the first time I attended a Market Focus session, and I knew I had to go back. It is a little expo in itself that requires no walking- you to sit down and find out trends and problems that need solving in particular commercial areas. Great fodder for new research ideas!
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By James Van Howe | Posted: 5 May 2011
Just wanted to chime in with a nagging note to remind you to plan your post-deadline itinerary before 8 pm. I am going to commit to PDPA-Session I and not try to hop around the standing-room only crowd. I am particularly interested in the supercontinuum generation and frequency-comb work in this session, some of which is pushing into the mid-ir where there are interesting chemicals to identify for spectroscopy and stand-off detection.
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By Frank Kuo | Posted: 5 May 2011
Attending poster sessions is energetic and adventurous. It is even a great social event. Compared to technical session, you never fall asleep and you can interrupt the presenters whenever you want (How great is this, you simply have a personal tutor at your disposal). In additions, you learn more in less time if your mind is a knowledge sponge.
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By James Van Howe | Posted: 5 May 2011
This year’s CLEO plenary sessions were exceptional. Monday evening hosted talks by Donald Keck, who pioneered the first low-loss optical fiber and James Fujimoto, renown for developing optical coherence tomography. Wednesday morning’s plenary followed with exhilarating work (I’m serious, not just blogger hyperbole here) on photonic crystals. Even the awards were exciting. Amnon Yariv, responsible for the creation of the distributed feedback laser, and whose book “Optical Electronics in Modern Communication,” I safeguard as one of the most helpful optics texts on my shelf, was presented with the 2011 IEEE Photonics Award. In his acceptance speech, he spoke briefly of his emigration to the United States from Israel 60 years ago. The freighter that carried him, other passengers, and iron ore across the Atlantic, made entry in none other than the city of Baltimore. Yariv, reminisced about his first meal after landing in a gritty, industrial, 1950s Baltimore-a ham sandwich (his first ever)!
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By Frank Kuo | Posted: 4 May 2011
Shuffling among many eye-opening technical sessions and CLEO’s Market Focus & Technology Transfer Showcase, I simply realize adventures with light are everywhere:
An amazing imaging technique called photoacoustic imaging/microscopy (JTuG) caught my full attention on Tuesday. It is a perfect example of light collaborating with sound to achieve something fascinating. Think about it, light and sound are siblings. They are governed by similar natural laws. You might argue that light can propagate in vacuum while the sound needs media to do so. But again, they are siblings, not twins. So this argument does not really hold. Anyway, taking that into account, isn’t it fun to see them hold hands and work on something new together!?
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By James Van Howe | Posted: 3 May 2011
The head of the student machine shop at Cornell, Bob Snedeker ( Sned), liked to remind us in a sarcastic fashion that its easier to take material away from a workpiece than to put it back on- warning: be careful about how much you take off as you cut. Or as the old saying goes in carpentry, “measure twice, cut once.” This is not necessarily true for laser machining of metals. Laser cladding, which was one of the topics discussed in the tutorial, AMB1 “Industrial Applications of Laser Materials Processing,” by Dr. Marshall Jones from GE Global Research, is a technique in which material can be added to a workpiece where too much was accidentally cut off. Like Play-doh, you can just put back on what you need. Wow, if only I could have laser-cladded my tool bits, and special nut and bolt we were required to make in order to graduate from machine-shop training! Sned had high standards and we spent many hours to make a piece to find out we needed to start over with fresh stock. It was back to the grindstone (literally!) until those bits had a perfect angle and facet.
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By Frank Kuo | Posted: 3 May 2011
An exciting conference is mainly composed of two parts – technical sessions and exhibition. We enjoy the technical sessions because that’s where we learn from our peers, get our brainstorms, and have a quick update on the scientific frontiers. These are addicted as you can tell me about it. However, ask yourself about the definition of a successful conference. Most of us will say a conference will not be complete without stopping by the exhibition hall to see the zoo of new products and technologies presented by numerous companies. Well, the souvenirs we gather from each booth are attractive too!
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