By Shamsul Arafin
Warm greetings from San Jose, CA. CLEO: 2014 has just gotten off to a great start with a number of short courses on a wide range of hot topics including ultrafast optics, nonlinear optics, metamaterials and nanophotonics. I was really excited about this event for so many reasons- all of which I’m not sure can fit in this one post. The main reason, of course, was to get familiar with current, groundbreaking research on my areas of expertise as well as to increase my industry knowledge on the latest advancements of these particular fields.
There are a number of enthusiastic attendees who showed up early morning for the short course, titled as Nanophotonics: Physics and Techniques. This course was conducted by a leading industry and academic expert with a great personality. He is none other than Prof. Axel Scherer from Caltech. It was really one of the most amazing and informative scientific talks I have ever attended.
What did he cover in his lecture? Prof. Scherer started his presentation describing the necessity of the device miniaturization and its current status worldwide. He then presented several types of micro/nano-resonators to realize highperformance lasers. He also explained how the basic concepts of microwave engineering discovered back to 1950s lead him to develop such resonators in optics/photonics areas. One of the greatest parts of his course which I was amazed with is the contribution he has/will made/make in the area of silicon photonics and its integration with the electronic circuits. Not only this, his lecture also covered how indirect bandgap material, e.g. silicon could be turned into direct bandgap and its evidence by showing his latest results on silicon LEDs. Wow! Isn’t that fascinating?
On the same day, the point of another great attraction was the short course on ‘NanoCavity Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) and Applications’ taught by Prof. Jelena Vuckovic from Stanford. In fact, NanoCavity QED is an exciting field of science and technology that aims to better understand the effect of solid-state light-matter interfaces in order to develop a scalable architecture for quantum communication. After having it highlighted and explained the fundamentals of atom-electromagnetic field interaction, Prof. Vuckovic showed some relevant results her group achieved on nanocavity QED by employing InAs/GaAs quantum dots in photonic crystal nanoresonators. This was a pretty interesting talk, indeed.
Looking forward to the main technical program starting today.
CLEO: 2014 runs 8-13 June 2014 at San Jose Convention Center, CA, USA. Registration is available onsite.
Posted: 9 June 2014 by
Shamsul Arafin
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