Laserati

Posted by Christina Folz, OPN Managing Editor 

The Nov. 11 Kojo Nnamdi show on NPR featured a fascinating interview with OSA member Tung H. Jeong, professor emeritus at Lake Forest College. Jeong discussed the technology of holograms as part of the show's "Tech Tuesday" segment. Jeong was asked about CNN's use of a so-called "holographic" technology when it beamed 3D images of its guests into the network's studio on election night. Jeong pointed out that those images were not actual holograms--and explained why. In fact, he said, "there is no relationship between the two except showing images." Jeong was later joined by physicist Hans Jurgen Kreuzer of Dalhousie University of Nova Scotia. The two described how the field of holography is advancing to include new applications in data storage, cellular manipulation, and holographic 3D TV. Regarding the latter: Because everyone would have to wear their own special glasses to see the holographic images, a key advantage is that "you don't have to fight for the remote," Jeong said.

The validation of numerical simulation software, e.g. for simulating the performance of fiber amplifiers and fiber lasers, is a great challenge. The article discusses various aspects which need to be validated, and shows that very different means are required. The comparison between calculated and experimental results is only one part of the game.

By Jacqueline Hewett I've spent part of my afternoon today checking out the Optical Society of America's (OSA) new Interactive Science Publishing (ISP) articles. The ISP articles, which appear in OSA journals such as Optics Express, link out to...

This podcast features a traveling lecturerâs presentation to the Wroclaw, Poland Chapter in May 2008.  The speaker, Dr. Hernando Garcia, was part of the International Student Chapters Meeting hosted by OSAâs Wroclaw Chapter.

Dr. Hernando Garcia speaks regularly on the topics of ultrafast optics and optoelectronics. If you would like more information about OSAâs Student Chapters, Traveling Lecturer Program, or other OSA multimedia talks and sessions; please email KiKi LâItalien at chaptersandsections@osa.org and thanks for supporting our podcast!

By Jacqueline Hewett I'd just like to say a big thank you to everyone who voted in our online poll. Some 60% of you believe that Barack Obama is the right choice for the global photonics industry, with 20% voting...

Posted by Christina Folz, OPN Managing Editor 

I recently heard from OSA Fellow Pablo Artal about his cool blog, Optics Confidential. Artal is a topical editor of JOSA A and a professor at Murcia University in Spain. His blog is presented in a Q & A format. Artal answers confidential questions from graduate students about optics, science, technology, ethics, and more. Although much of the content is focused on Artal's own research and interest areas (visual and biomedical optics), he also provides general advice on how to give a good scientific presentation, for example, or how to ensure that your work is correctly cited. Check it out! 

By Jacqueline Hewett The goLITE BLU from Philips It's always a shock to the system when British Summer Time comes to an end, and certainly I know a few people who really suffer at this time of year. With...

By Jacqueline Hewett I received an e-mail today about a Masters programme called CIMET, which stands for Color in Informatics and Media Technology. As I hadn't heard of this course before, I thought I would write a short post...

By Jon Cartwright, reporter on physicsworld.com Hubble is back with a perfect 10 image (Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Livio) After a month in "safety mode" following an error on its onboard data formatter, the Hubble is back online...

By Jacqueline Hewett When a colleague forwarded me on an e-mail this week with the subject line "Lost dog finds way home using fibre laser" it was enough to spark my curiosity. What could lost dogs and fibre lasers...

Here are some links to some podcasts recorded by Tanya recently: Interview with Richard Chirgwin from a series of Tubes Tanya speaking about “Application of optical fibres to environmental monitoring” here Tanya speaking at the Emerging technologies in environmental monitoring workshop for ICE WaRM University of Adelaide Research Tuesday Public Seminar       

By Patricia Daukantas

During his plenary speech at last week’s Frontiers in Optics (FiO) meeting, John C. Mather, one of the 2006 Nobel Prize winners in physics, described the optical systems that will go into the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is scheduled for launch in 2013. Mather, a senior astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (USA), spent 15 years taking the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, which measured the faint afterglow from the Big Bang that created the universe.

Mather spent 15 years taking COBE from the proposal stage to its 1989 launch. He was the principal investigator for the COBE instrument called the Far Infrared Absolute Spectrophotometer (FIRAS), which measured the black-body spectrum of the cosmic background radiation from the Big Bang to unprecedented accuracy. (When he first showed his experiment-matches-theory result to an astronomers’ meeting in January 1990, his colleagues gave him a standing ovation.)

Mather’s current project, JWST, involves almost every section of NASA. The planned 6.5-m space telescope looks a little like a solar energy concentrator in the desert, he said, because it needs to have a multilayered sunshade in order to operate at a temperature of 40 K. JWST will be launched on an unmanned Ariane booster rocket and will fly to the L2 Lagrangian point, a stable position about 1 million miles on the opposite side of Earth from the Sun. After showing an animation of the way the telescope is supposed to unfold by itself once it reaches L2, Mather quipped, “If you’re a mechanical engineer, this is either terrifying or thrilling.”

JWST will use a three-mirror anastigmat optical design for a wide field of view. (In addition to the primary and secondary mirrors, it will have a “fine steering mirror” at the Cassegrain focus.) The scientists selected a beryllium mirror because of its superior cryogenic properties—it undergoes much less thermal distortion than the ultra-low-expansion glass used in many ground-based telescopes.

Among JWST’s many cameras will be NIRSpec, a near-infrared imaging spectrograph that can photograph 100 galaxies at once. “If it takes two weeks to get an exposure, we don’t want to be limited to just one galaxy,” Mather said.

Since data from the Hubble Space Telescope showed that galaxies were formed longer ago than scientists had thought, JWST is likely to study the origins of galaxies and the earliest populations of stars. JWST could also study Earth-like transiting planets, or planets that pass between their parent star and the observer. Astrophysicists over the years have proposed a number of schemes for orbiting planet-hunting interferometers, with instruments mounted on widely spaced satellites, but tight budgets at the space agency may mean that not all of those projects will fly.

By Matin Durrani, editor of Physics World magazine The search is on for Stephen Hawking's successor Now here's a job that very few scientists can possibly have a chance of securing. The University of Cambridge is inviting applications for...

By Jacqueline Hewett There's just one week to go in the 2008 US presidential campaign as I sit down to write this blog post. It's an exciting time as America decides but this year in a first for optics.org...

A laser that can scan a crowd and identify people who have been handling explosives is being secretly tested at British airports and railway stations. The device - no bigger than a shoe box - could also be used by police and MI5 surveillance teams to identify Islamic terrorists outside mosques or community centres. The laser can [...]

Kris, Shahraam and Tanya recently had a paper published in Optics Express. You can find the Optics Infobase abstract and full-text .pdf link here. Citation: K. J. Rowland, S. Afshar V., and T. M. Monro, “Bandgaps and antiresonances in integrated-ARROWs and Bragg fibers; a simple model,” Opt. Express 16, 17935-17951 (2008)        [...]

Laser illuminated HDTV has arrived, in the form of a 10” deep 65” display. It represents Mitsubishi’s effort to capture the top rung of home theater enthusiasts. For $7000 retail price, the L65-A90’s will treat you to a level of performance that exceeds any display HD Guru has tested to date in terms color gamut, [...]

The opening day of this year's Frontiers in Optics (FiO) conference was dominated by a packed morning plenary session where the speakers included NASA's John Mather as well as Anton Zeilinger from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Mather's talk...

WERDER Bremen goalkeeper Christian Vander has become the latest player to be targeted by a fan with a laser pen during the Champions League clash with Panathinaikos. Greek football has been plagued with such incidents in recent time, and Vander admitted he knew it was coming during the 2-2 draw. It did not surprise me – I [...]

This weekend sees the start of the 92nd annual meeting of the Optical Society of America: Frontiers in Optics. With novel optical techniques under development for a range of diagnostic and therapeutic applications, as well as being used to...