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Thursday at CLEO: posters, pizza and postdeadline

By Howard Lee


Today technical and poster sessions are great as usual. Although it takes me some time to wait before getting a free pizza due to the long queue, I then have chance to chat with my previous advisor at Hong Kong on our recent researches. I enjoyed all these networking sessions filled with food and drinks to discuss science and the latest status of all our friends and colleagues.

The highlight of the day is the post-deadline session in the evening starting at 8pm. These post-deadline papers are selected and recognized as the latest important results in the field of optics and photonics. I attended several talks in these three parallel sessions. Here I would like to highlight some talks that I found of particular interest to me.

Optomechanics with Superfluid Helium-4
(Postdeadline: JTh5B.2)
(G. I. Harris et al., University of Queensland)

This is the first talk I found particularly interesting. The presenter from University of Queensland presented their latest results on the study of optomechanics with superfluid helium-4 in an optical microresonator. He explained that superfluid has the advantages for quantum optomechanics because of their zero viscosity, quantized motion, and the potential of strong phonon-phonon interaction. They tried to use a thin film of superfluid helium onto a surface of an optical whispering gallery mode resonator to investigate the optomechanical effect. Using such super-fluid resonator, they observed Brownian motion with resonance frequency of 330kHz at 580mK. They also studied the photothermal induced laser cooling and heating by detuning the laser. In addition, the Duffing nonlinearity appeared with only ~37 intracavity photons in the sideband and ~1000 intracavity photons in the carrier. The presenter claims that the study opens up a promising system to study macroscopic non-classical mechanical states. We look forward to seeing more results and fundamental studies based on these superfluid Helium-4.

Optomechanics with Superfluid Helium-4

(Top left) Representation of a microtoroidal resonator covered in superfluid helium-4. (Top right) Change in frequency and quality factor from liquification at 1K to 580mK. Brownian motion of 330kHx mode at 580mK. (Bottom) Photothermal backaction cooling and heating of a 330kHz superfluid mode from different optical modes. Left) Broadening of the mechanical linewidth with detuning. Right) Narrowing of the mechanical linewidth with detuning. [JTh5B.2]

Integrated Continuously Tunable Optical Orbital Angular Momentum Generator
(Postdeadline: JTh5A.5)
(Jie Sun et al., MIT)

Researchers from MIT presented the first demonstration of the generation of tunable orbital angular momentum using integrated silicon photonic circuit and electrical control. They experimentally demonstrate the generation of optical vortex beam with well-defined continuously tunable integer and non-integer OAM states. Their works are definitely an important step to develop ultra-compact on-chip OAM generator that would find a lot of applications in optical communication, optical trapping and sensing.
Integrated Continuously Tunable Optical Orbital Angular Momentum Generator

(Top) A schematic and SEM of the silicon photonic circuit to generate continuously tunable optical OAM. (Bottom) The interference pattern of the generated optical vortex beam with a Gaussian beam. Applying a single voltage on the phase shifters, the OAM state (indicated by the number and direction of the spiral arms of the interference pattern) was continuously tuned from = −4 to = +4 with both integer and non-integer OAM states. [JTh5A.5]

Posted: 15 May 2015 by Howard Lee | with 0 comments

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