Laserati

An image-guided femtosecond laser is allowing surgeons to remove individual cancer cells while adjacent cells remain intact.

Researchers from the Universities of Texas and Stanford, US have demonstrated a miniaturized probe that enables ablation of single cells and subcellular structures at high precision. The tool combines two-photon microscopy and femtosecond laser microsurgery in a 10x15x40 mm housing (Optics Express 16 9996).

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Development of Intense Sources of Few-Cycle Laser Pulses
Quantum Optics and Laser Science Group, Department of Physics

Salary from 1 May 2008: £25,310 - £36,880 per annum

Imperial College is ranked the fifth best university in the world (Times Higher QS World University Rankings 2007).

We are seeking a Research Associate within the Blackett Laboratory Laser Consortium in the Department of Physics at the South Kensington Campus.

The work is funded by the UK EPSRC and will involve experimental development of laser sources as part of a larger project to control of electrons by few-cycle intense laser pulses. The wider project objectives include the measurement of processes driven by few-cycle pulses in atoms, molecules, clusters and surfaces.

This sub-project involves the development of a state-of-the-art few-cycle laser system providing high-power carrier-envelope phase (CEP) stabilised and synchronised pulses at different frequencies (NIR and IR) at kilohertz pulse repetition rates. The main task will be to develop synchronised few-cycle pulses in the IR and UV and will require the implementation of novel nonlinear optical (NLO) techniques to provide short pulses (<10fs) at 400nm and other frequencies at pulse energies up to 0.4mJ while preserving CEP stability. The other main duty is the design and development of a high-energy (up to 0.3mJ) few-cycle (<15fs) IR source (approx 1.5microns) based on optical parametric amplification. These pulses will be used in a range of novel experiments examining electron recollision in strong fields.

More information at jobs.ac.uk

Paolo Villoresi and his colleagues at the University of Padova in Italy, in collaboration with the group of Anton Zeilinger in Austria, have taken the first step to establishing quantum communications in space by exchanging single photons from an orbiting satellite to Earth.

They demonstrated how the Matera Laser Ranging Observatory in Matera, Italy, used for satellite laser ranging with ultimate precision, can be adapted as a quantum communication receiver to detect single quanta emitted by an orbiting source—in this case a Japanese low-Earth-orbiting satellite. They also identified the exact techniques needed to detect the very weak quantum signal to be exploited in a dedicated satellite.

The research will be presented at the 2008 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics/Quantum Electronics and Laser Science Conference (CLEO/QELS) May 4-9 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, Calif.

Source: Optical Society of America

Sharp Corp had a meeting on technologies relating to blue-violet and red semiconductor laser diodes. It explained the market conditions and the output growth as well as its efforts to enhance the laser power and reduce the module size.

via: Tech-On

The company forecast that 22 million low-power blue-violet diodes will be sold globally in 2008. Also, it estimates that the sales of high-power blue-violet diodes will reach 2.2 million units as the market for Blu-ray compatible products started to rise from the 2007 Christmas season. Annual sales of low-power and high-power products are expected to exceed 100 million units in 2010 and 2012, respectively.

Moreover, Sharp unveiled its plans to release a 350mW class blue-violet diode product in the later half of 2009 and a 400mW class product by around 2010.

Laserful.com is a very interesting blog on lasers. As described by itself:

Laserful.com is a blog on all the wonderful laser-y things. The tagline “a directory of laserful things” intentionly mimics Boing Boing’s “a directory of wonderful things”. You can consider laserful.com as a Boing Boing for lasers.

It focuses on wonderful light side of lasers for general public. Laserweb.org focuses on providing "hard core" information and communication forum for laser researchers and manufactors.

Now laserful.com allows laserweb.org to aggregate its updates as a partnership.

The past two weeks were busy for laser peoples, because SPIE Photonics West was held on 19 - 24 January 2008 in San Jose, California, USA, soon after that, ASSP 2008 on January 27-30, 2008 in Nara, Japan. These two conferences are considered to be most important. If you missed Photonics West 2008, you may get some sense from reports on SPIE website and Optics.org's Showblog.

While ASSP is considered to be most valuable laser conference by many laser researchers, it attracts very little industrial exhibitions, and media coverage. I was there. I feel ASSP 2008 was not as successful as previous ones. The banquet talk is off topic, not even interesting for most of attendees. There was a ceramic laser special session. But no new technical information is presented. What's obvious from the conference is that ultrafast laser and laser ignition are hot.

Nine research groups have begun tackling the challenge of producing a high-power 500 nm semiconductor laser in a three-year US-based research program called VIGIL.

The teams met to initiate the program at the end of November, and they have until June 2009 to hit the first milestone and produce a workable green laser based on GaN.

VIGIL stands for Visible InGaN Injection Lasers, a name that reflects the need to include high proportions of indium to obtain green light from GaN-based laser diodes. More at Optics.org

Arasor acquired US-based Novalux through US$7 million as part of a joint venture with ZTE Corporation, China's largest telecommunications and networking provider, to commercialise laser chip technology for use in TVs, projectors, and smaller screens such as laptop, PDA and mobile phone. via: SmartHouse

A nice application of laser.

Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Ashok Ghosh has invented a laser-based testing system that can check a bridge's safety while vehicles use the structure.

"Traffic will never notice this is getting tested right now," Ghosh said.

A laser gun mounted on one of the bridge's unyielding supports shoots a cross-shaped beam to a pixel board attached to a span, or an area between two supports.

The pixel board is wirelessly connected to a computer and registers which pixels the laser beam hits.

The board's movement as vehicles pass allows the laser beam to eliminate different pixels, showing the deflection, or movement, of that span of the bridge.

The system would be on the bridge and collect data for several hours.
Engineers would know from the bridge's design what the deflection should be, and compare it to the data from the laser-based system.

via: EI Defensor Chieftain

Complete experimental characterization of stimulated Brillouin scattering in photonic crystal fiber - J. C. Beugnot, T. Sylvestre, D. Alasia, H. Maillotte, V. Laude, A. Monteville, L. Provino, N. Traynor, S. Foaleng Mafang, L. Thévenaz
We provide a complete experimental characterization of stimulated
Brillouin scattering in a 160 m long solid-core photonic crystal
fiber, including threshold and spectrum measurements as well as
position-resolved mapping of the Brillouin frequency shift. In
particular, a three-fold increase of ... [Opt. Express 15, 15517-15522 (2007)] [Optics Express]