By Arti Agrawal
CLEO 2015 has begun with a bang. I started it with misplacing my suitcase at San Francisco airport and having to drive back from San Jose to San Francisco to retrieve it. Luckily this unlocked bag that had my laptop and other valuables was not stolen. It seems that the same luck is staying with me in my choice of talks. And I’ll get to these in a bit.
First I sat and made the schedule of social events I want to attend. Monday evening has the Chair’s reception, Tuesday has the Women in Photonics lunch, the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Journal of Quantum Electronics, the conference reception (I am out of breath, are you yet?), Wednesday has the exhibit happy hour and then on Thursday is the pizza lunch!!
I make it a point to attend as many informal events as I possibly can. It is a great way to talk to people in a relaxed setting when they aren’t stressed about their talk or working away on a laptop. A beverage in one hand and a smile on their face, everyone is far more approachable even if you don’t know them already.
Having made my list of technical sessions (after the social!) I was armed and ready to go. I decide to focus on the fiber sessions: “Modes in Fiber” and also “Novel Fiber Materials”.
In the “Modes in Fiber” session the talks covered large mode area fiber designs, as well as fabrication, and went on to some very interesting new ideas on quantum walks in multi core fibers. Large mode area fibers, as a member of the audience pointed out is not a new born field and there are several designs out there. So what makes a design worthy of attention? I think one of the authors answered this very well in his presentation, SM2L.2, when Deepak Jain spoke of the three factors that are key:
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the metric used to decide what effective single moded operation
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loss of the fundamental mode
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the effective radius or area at which bend loss becomes large
This discussion particularly interested me because it is this sort of perspective setting that is so important for good research. At times one can get lost in the virtual forest of journal and conference papers each of which announce a slightly (or hugely) better performance. Yet what is the process for determining which design is really best and will perhaps become the industry standard? This is where conferences like CLEO that bring members of the community together can help find the answers or set people on the path!
Undoubtedly the most exciting talk of the session was SM2L.4 by Peter Mosley from Bath. He showed some exciting simulation and experimental results for multicore fibers, whose propagation constant differences were reconstructed by a Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation, a statistical approach. The striking thing was the difference between the classical behavior one might see (when a particle moves through an array with equal probability of moving left or right) and the non-classical behavior they demonstrated for a photon between coupled waveguides. The waveguides if assumed to have identical coupling strength and uniform propagation constants, immediately show the quantum nature of photons and a very different distribution of end states than the classical particle.
So I was quite pleased with myself for having a chosen a good session and I am looking forward to the next one!
Posted: 13 May 2015 by
Arti Agrawal
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