By James Van Howe | Posted: 20 March 2011
You may not think that LED lighting would be a controversial topic, but as the New York Times reports, it may be indirectly responsible for new anger among conservative lawmakers in the United States. A U.S. federal law passed in 2007 by the Bush administration will, among other energy-saving measures, make the sale of the incandescent 100-watt light bulbs illegal in 2012. Republican representatives Joe Barton of Texas and Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota, and Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky have recently become vocal about the rights of Americans to purchase lighting of their choice (energy-efficient or not).
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By James Van Howe | Posted: 18 March 2011
I know I am not alone when I write that my thoughts go out to our Japanese colleagues, collaborators, and friends as they cope with the aftermath of the March 11, earthquake and tsunami. The field of optics has a rich history of Japanese innovation. CLEO habitually hosts a significant number of contributed papers, tutorials, short courses, and plenary talks from Japanese scientists or those with ties to Japanese universities or companies. I hope for the safety and health of the survivors of this horrific disaster, and for what it may be worth, offer condolences to those who lost friends, family and loved-ones.
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By James Van Howe | Posted: 4 March 2011
The conference program for CLEO 2011 was just released on Wednesday, March 2. Among many other cutting-edge and ground-breaking contributed papers are those from the new conference to debut this May, CLEO: Applications and Technology. Browsing the topic subcategory, Lasers for Government Science and Security Applications, I came across titles that seemed to be the stuff out of a James Bond movie, ATuF2, “Mono-Energetic Gamma-rays (MEGa-rays) and the Dawn of Nuclear Photonics” and ATuF4, “2D+3D Face Imaging for Stand-off Biometric Identification.” Can’t you just picture the mad, evil-scientist-villain (disfigured in some way, stroking his cat) plotting to steal a MEGa-Ray device in one scene, and Q 3D-scanning 007′s face in order for him to gain access into MI6 in another? Maybe I need to do more optics research and watch less movies, however, there’s no question about impact of these papers.
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By Frank Kuo | Posted: 27 February 2011
Most people (well, let’s assume most people love physical science, especially light matter interaction) have a rough understanding about photonic crystals (PCs). To start with – photonic crystals (PCs) are periodic optical nanostructures that are designed to manipulate light. In general, to affect light’s propagation, the length of the repeating unit cell of the nanostructures in PCs is compatible to the wavelength of light. If you reach this far, you know quite a lot about PCs.
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By James Van Howe | Posted: 24 February 2011
As we await decisions on contributed papers in the next couple of weeks and for the technical program to be scheduled, the list of tutorials and invited talks for CLEO 2011 is rounding out. Two provoking titles that recently caught my eye were tutorial talks “Femtomagnetism” to be given by Jean-Yves Bigot from CNRS in Strasbourg, France under CLEO: QELS Fundamental Science 4: Optical Interactions with Condensed Matter and Ultrafast Phenomena as well as “Therapeutic Applications of Light: Photodynamic Therapy, the Killer and Low Level Light Therapy, the Healer” to be given by Michael Hamblin from Massachusetts General Hospital, under CLEO: Applications & Technology 1: Biomedical.
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By James Van Howe | Posted: 30 January 2011
Just this past Tuesday, U.S. president, Barack Obama, invoked science and innovation in the State-of-the-Union-Address, as the silver bullet to heal an ailing U.S. economy and crumbling infrastructure. U.S. statesmen and -women alike got up out of their seats repeatedly to give applause for science.
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By Frank Kuo | Posted: 19 January 2011
Light is wave. Well, most of the time, it behaves like so. Due to its wave nature, it is not trivial to confine any light beam to its original shape when it is propagating except a plane wave. Putting in one sentence, light beams tend to diverge. Actually, even a plane wave has edges in reality, so plane waves diverge too. So, what if we can create a light beam that retains its diameter and energy distribution transverse to the direction of propagation through space, a “spatial soliton” as being called by scientific community, wouldn’t that be a great achievement? After all, human beings have been trying to manipulate light for thousands of years. In fact, we can do much more thanks to the efforts of researchers who are fascinated by making this happen.
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By Frank Kuo | Posted: 10 January 2011
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) has been growing exponentially over the past two decades. It is not difficult to see why — First of all, its resolution (~10^-6 meter) and the strength of penetration depth (a few millimeters) fill the gap between different imaging methods. Figure 1 shows this clearly.
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By James Van Howe | Posted: 4 January 2011
Like usual, this Christmas holiday my family and I spent some time at my mother-in-law’s rural home in Spring Valley, Wisconsin enjoying good food, fresh air, and the escape from the confines and bustle of city-living. However, what was different about this year’s visit was her home’s new Terabit/s capacity for current and future digital communication and entertainment needs. My mother-in-law lives in one of six million American homes that currently have Fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) connectivity.
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By James Van Howe | Posted: 24 November 2010
Today, the day before Thanksgiving, is one of the busiest holidays for air-travel in the U.S. The latest hubbub in U.S. airport security is the use of x-ray body scanners to detect for potential explosives or weapons carried by passengers. The scanners spray the traveler with soft x-rays and then detect the back-scattered radiation to produce an image of the passenger, minus his or her clothing. Many travelers have found this new level of security too invasive and have opted out for the traditional pat-down
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