• Technical Conference:  05 – 10 May 2024
  • The CLEO Hub: 07 – 09 May 2024

Exciting day filled with plenary session, tutorial talk, market focus and OSA student booth!

By Howard Lee


I was happy to spend most of my time today at several CLEO events; Plenary talk, technical talks, poster session and market focus. This morning’s Plenary session  was on the topic “Fibres and the future” by David Payne. Prof. Payne  gave a great overview on the works of fiber amplifier. Using cladding-pumped microsturctured fiber, amplifier with high output power at telecommunication wavelength or IR can be realized. Prof. Payne also suggested an idea that these kinds of fiber-laser would be designed as a powerful laser for next accelerator for CERN! This idea may be realized by using array of fiber lasers combined with multicore fibers to confine to a high power output laser and finally delivery by hollow core bandgap fiber.

I also attended another nice tutorial talk in the morning given by Prof. Nikolay Zheludev (University of Southampton) on “Optical Properties on Demand: Reconfigurable and Coherently Controlled Metamaterials” (FW1K.1). Prof. Zheludev starts his presentation by comparing the citation number between metamaterial and laser (when it was starts invented in 1962), showing the rapid development on the field of metamaterial since 2000 (see figure below). He then pointed out the importance of developing tunable and reconfigurable metamaterials, in which would allow precise control of electromagnetic responses of the materials at nanometer scale. He presented several new materials of metamaterials (e.g., grapheme, nitride, conducting oxide, silicon and topological insulator) and tunable mechanisms studied by his group and other groups. One particular important example of reconfigurable metamaterial he presented is utilizing electromagnetic force (Lorentz force) to functionalize the metadevice (see structure below). Finally, he mentioned three “killer applications” which metamaterials would potential take place: 1) tunable lasing spaser, 2) mobile dynamic 3D display and 3) space division multiplexing in fiber networks. After the talk, I talked to Prof. Zheludev and asked him how would we keep growing the field of metamaterial and impacting our life using metamaterial as what the laser can do. He said that everyone working in this field (metmaterials) should work hard and one day we will see the high impact of metamaterials.

The next photonic revolution: Metamaterials

(Images: Courtesy of Nikolay Zheludev) (FW1K.1) http://www.nanophotonics.org.uk/niz/niz_talk.pdf

The MarketFocus: The Future of “Enabling” Photonics Innovation at 2-4pm today is an interesting event. As mentioned in the previous posts by Shamsul Arafin, there are a lot of discussions on how to enable photonics technology, including the support required from industry, academic university and government. To summarize the event, the chair Jason Eichenholz (CEO, Open Photonics Inc) asked the panel speakers what will be most important area of photonics for the next 15 years. Different speakers have different opinions, but  health care, security, energy recourses (e.g. solar energy), vision (sensing, imaging) and environmental issue (e.g. clean water) are the top  areas where they think photonics can play a high impact role in the near future. Nevertheless, the government support is one of the most important issues on enabling photonic innovation.

By the way, if you are OSA student, I suggest you to have a look at the OSA student membership booth. What they (OSA) provide you is the set of “big bang theory” where you can get some coffee, relax a bit or even play table tennis on the optical table. Also, there are some free OSA T.shirts and Newport snacks. So I hope you get the chance to check it out!

The OSA Student Lounge

Two more days to go till the end of CLEO conference; so take your time to learn as much as you can  these last two days!

Posted: 12 June 2014 by Howard Lee | with 0 comments

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