Laserati

Radiohead just released a new video for its song “House of Cards” from the album “In Rainbows”.

No cameras or lights were used. Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.

Watch the making-of video to learn about how the video was made and the various technologies that were used to capture and render 3D data.

Google Code

I found this presentation on Google Video: Active galactic nuclei with laser guide star adaptive optics. It is from the AAS 212th Meeting. The presenter is Claire Max.

Adaptive optics on the current generation of 8 - 10 meter telescopes yields spatial resolutions in the near-infrared comparable to those of Hubble at visible wavelengths. Laser guide stars are now making these high spatial resolutions available over a large fraction of the sky. I will describe several areas in which these advances are being applied to AGN science: 1) measurement of black hole masses in nearby galaxies from kinematics of stars and gas; 2) study of the spatial distribution of stellar populations and dust in galaxies at 0.5 < z < 1.5, and 3) tests of the relationship between galaxy mergers and AGN activity. I will conclude with a discussion of the planned Next Generation Adaptive Optics system at the W. M. Keck Observatory, outlining the expected improvements in AGN science with this new system.

The authors of the time lapse movie are Stéphane Guisard, Valère Leroy and Jean Pajus. It is fun to see the PARSEC laser pointing to different directions of the universe over the night. I wonder what the night sky would look like in Hawaii, where there are several guide star lasers.

This is a time lapse movie made from individual images taken with a Canon 20Da camera and a 8mm lens. This accelerated movie shows a complete night at Paranal Observatory starting at sunset and finishing at dawn. That night, the Laser Guide Star Facility was in use and its yellow sodium Laser beam left its footprint on our movie. The laser beam creates a Laser Guide Star in the high atmosphere, 90 km above us. This ‘bright’ artificial star helps the adaptive optics system located in the main telescope, to measure and correct the distorsions of the images produced by the atmosphere, in real time and several hundreds of times per second.

The bright part of the Milky Way, containing the galactic center, is disappearing to the west on the left hand side of the movie. The Andromeda galaxy is visible also, as a diffused and elongated spot crossing the sky just above the domes. One can also see the Pleiades and “upside down” Orion constellation rising (remember this movie is done from the Southern hemisphere) together with the other half of our Milky Way . Finally the moon lightens the morning sky just before sunrise.

We have a new publication online now: multiwatts narrow linewidth fiber Raman amplifiers. Basically, the paper shows fiber Raman amplifier can be used to amplify narrow linewidth laser to a useful power level, while linewidth keeping narrow. This would be a surprise to most laser researchers. In this specific report, we have obtained 4.8 W, ~10MHz 1178nm laser with 27dB gain and more than 10% efficiency. The tricks and reason are explained in the paper.

WASHINGTON, June 30—A team of researchers at the Ocean University of China has developed and tested a mobile lidar (light detection and ranging) station that can accurately measure wind speed and direction over large areas in real time -- an application useful for aviation safety, weather forecasting and sports.

As described in the July 1 issue of the journal Optics Letters, published by the Optical Society, the mobile lidar station can measure wind fields more accurately, which could help world-class athletes compete in international competitions, such as the Olympics. Ocean University is in Qingdao, which is hosting the sailing competitions of the XXIX Olympic Games and the Beijing 2008 Paralympic Games, and this technique is being tested in conjunction with the event.

"Wind is non-uniform even in a small sailing field," says Professor Zhi-Shen Liu of the Key Laboratory of Ocean Remote Sensing, Ministry of Education of China, Ocean University of China, who led the research. "Athletes could maximize their performances if they have the most accurate information to help them capture the wind."

In Olympic sailing, individual competitors or teams of athletes sail various classes of sailboats in timed trials over a single course. The contest requires them to navigate upwind, downwind and everything in between. Their final time depends on numerous factors, including the boat design, the skill of the sailors, course difficulty and ocean currents. Perhaps the most important factor, though, is how well the athletes can harness the wind that fills their sails.

Because wind constantly changes speed and direction, athletes and coaches hope to have the best information at the start of a run. On cloudy, rainy days, the standard meteorological tool of Doppler radar can accurately provide wind field information. When no clouds are present, however, Doppler radar is ineffective. The best wind data on clear days comes from ocean buoys and land stations that use wind cups and ultrasonic anemometers to measure wind speed.

In the Qingdao sailing area, where this summer's competitions will take place, only four buoys, one boat and one tower are available to measure sea surface winds within a competition area of approximately 10 square kilometers.

Liu and his lidar group, composed of research scientists and graduate students, have been working with an optical remote sensing technology called Doppler lidar, which they are applying for weather and environmental research. Lidar works by scattering laser beams off atmospheric aerosols or molecules. Doppler lidar takes advantage of the fact that when these aerosols or molecules are moving in the wind, the scattered laser light changes frequency -- the same way an approaching car has a higher pitched sound than a car driving away.

The advantage of Doppler lidar, says Liu, is that it can quickly sample a large area, providing a much finer map of winds than buoys alone. He and his group have developed a lidar bus, which can move equipment to the experiment field conveniently.

Last year, they successfully tested their new bus at the 2007 Qingdao International Regatta sailing event. They moved the bus to the seashore near the sailing field, and made a horizontal scan over the sea surface, making the measurement in real time and then uploading the data to the local meteorological station every 10 minutes. They envision a similar effort in the upcoming Olympic and Paralympic games.

The research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Key Laboratory of Ocean Remote Sensing, the Ministry of Education of China and the China Meteorological Administration (CMA).

Paper: "A high spatial and temporal resolution mobile incoherent Doppler lidar for sea surface wind measurements" by Zhi-Shen Liu et al., Optics Letters, Vol. 33, No. 13, July 1, 2008 p. 1485-1487. For a copy of the paper, please contact Angela Stark, astark@osa.org or 202.416.1443.
About OSA

Uniting more than 70,000 professionals from 134 countries, the Optical Society (OSA) brings together the global optics community through its programs and initiatives. Since 1916 OSA has worked to advance the common interests of the field, providing educational resources to the scientists, engineers and business leaders who work in the field by promoting the science of light and the advanced technologies made possible by optics and photonics. OSA publications, events, technical groups and programs foster optics knowledge and scientific collaboration among all those with an interest in optics and photonics. For more information, visit www.osa.org.

William Bennett, pioneering laser researcher, died from cancer of the esophagus at 78. Via: Boston Global

In 1960, Bennett, Ali Javan and Donald Herriott built the first gas laser, which generated a continuous infrared beam from a mixture of helium and neon, at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J. Bennett would go on to develop nearly a dozen additional lasers.
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Bennett became a tenured professor at Yale University in 1962, was named Charles Baldwin Sawyer professor in applied science and physics in 1972 and would spend 38 years at the school, becoming an emeritus professor in 1998 and retiring in 2000.

He is not only a laser physicist. On Yale website:

Professor Bennett was co-inventor of the first gas laser (the helium-neon laser), discovered the argon ion laser, was first to observe spectral hole burning effects in gas lasers, and created a theory of hole burning effects on laser oscillation. He was co-discoverer of lasers using electron impact excitation in each of the noble gases, dissociative excitation transfer in the neon-oxygen laser (the first chemical laser), and collision excitation in several metal vapor lasers. He was one of the first to incorporate the use of computers to teach physics and, with his daughter Dr. Jean Bennett Maguire, devised a method of real-time spectral phonocardiography for the detection and classification of heart murmurs. He set a stringent limit on the existence of “The Fifth Force” and showed that it was improbable that magnetic fields from power lines could cause cancer. Research he did on the physics of musical instruments became the basis of a popular course he gave at Yale. He has written eight books, twelve patents and over 120 research papers. His principal avocation is playing chamber music. He studied the clarinet with Simeon Bellison and has been clarinet soloist with several amateur symphony orchestras.

The Centre of Expertise in Photonics (CoEP) at the University of Adelaide, which is lead by Professor Tanya Monro, now has an official blog.

An update from OSA Podcast, on career in Optics. Worth listening.

Do you know how to use your membership in a professional society to its full benefit? Do you sometimes wonder what direction your life will take once you have decided to go into industry or academia? When you are looking at the long lists of publications that other people have accumulated, do you ponder your ability to achieve a publications list as prolific? In May 2008 at the CLEO/QELS conference in San Jose, California, four well-known OSA members gathered together to talk about these topics and to share tips from their own lives to benefit the young professionals who are now where they once were.

Career Podcast Part 1
Career Podcast Part 2

Berthold Leibinger Stiftung offers two prizes dedicated on applied laser technology. The Berthold Leibinger Innovationspreis honors advancements in the application or generation of laser light, while the Berthold Leibinger Zukunftspreis honors research milestones regarding the application or generation of laser light.

The jury includes the following members: Stephen Anderson Associate Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Laser Focus World Prof. Dr. med. Hans-Peter Berlien Chief Physician of the Laser Medical Department, Elisabeth Hospital Berlin Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hubertus Christ President of the DVT – German Federation of Technical and Scientific Associations Prof. Dr. Theodor Hänsch Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics Prof. Dr.-Ing. Helmut Hügel University of Stuttgart, Institute for High-Power Beam Technologies Prof. Dr. Ursula Keller Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Institute of Quantum Electronics Prof. Dr. med. John Stuart Nelson Medical Director of the Beckmann Laser Institute Prof. Dr. Hans-Jürgen Quadbeck-Seeger Former Research Executive Director of BASF AG Prof. Dr. Orazio Svelto Technical University of Milan, Department of Physics Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hans-Jürgen Warnecke Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation