By Patricia Daukantas

No one is immune from the possibility of heart disease. A team of scientists working in Japan has demonstrated a femtosecond laser technique that could help medical researchers test anti-fibrillation medicines on heart cells in the laboratory.

The group at Osaka University has used high-power 780-nm laser pulses to force heart tissue samples to change their beating frequency. This “optical pacemaker,” reported in Optics Express, would not work outside of the laboratory because of long-term complications, but it could test new drugs that might eventually lessen the need for pacemakers.

Read more about the research on OSA's Web site and check out the full Optics Express article here.

2008-05 May, Biomedical optics biomedical optics

By Patricia Daukantas

A longtime friend of mine recently cleaned out an old pile of paperwork and found a small treasure, which he passed along to me. It’s the advance program for CLEO—in 1983.

Twenty-five years ago, the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics took place in Baltimore, as it has in most odd-numbered years since (and will again in 2009). In 1983, the Baltimore Convention Center was only four years old, and the neighboring attractions around the city’s Inner Harbor were even newer.

I’ve been told that one of the reasons we’ve made Baltimore our unofficial East Coast home for CLEO is that the convention center’s proximity to the waterfront makes it easier to get the large temporary flows of water that are needed by water-cooled lasers on the exhibit floor. That’s become less of an issue over the years as laser technology has changed, but the harbor still sits nearby, just in case.

Some names have changed since 1983—the IEEE Quantum Electronics and Applications Society became the IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society (LEOS) two years later. But I also spy familiar names in the 25-year-old program. For instance, one of the general co-chairs of CLEO 1983 was Tingye Li, who went on to become OSA president in 1995, and the 1983 CLEO treasurer was Gary C. Bjorklund, who served as OSA president in 1998. Then-future Nobel laureate William D. Phillips was the lead author on an invited paper describing the laser cooling of an atomic beam to 70 mK.

CLEO has certainly gotten bigger since 1983. The advance program lists five or six concurrent technical sessions at any given time. This year, CLEO and its sister conference, Quantum Electronics and Laser Science (QELS), ran as many as 13 concurrent sessions, with the Photonic Applications, Systems and Technologies (PhAST) meeting adding one more track. Twenty-five years ago, the CLEO exhibit hall had about 160 exhibitors; this year there were more than 350.

Graphic design has certainly gotten more colorful over the years (see above). Longtime OSA volunteers may wax nostalgic over the Jefferson Place address on the cover of the advance program. The Society moved out of that brownstone into larger digs back in 1990.

One of the interesting—but hardly surprising—things about the 1983 advance program booklet is the total absence of electronic addresses. Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web’s protocol was six years in the future, and computer networks were still small and comparatively disconnected from each other. The CLEO 1983 advance program specifies that authors of postdeadline submissions would get their acceptance or rejection notifications by telephone.

Longtime OSA journal editor and OPN contributing editor John N. Howard compiled some interesting notes about other Society conferences of the 1970s and 1980s in this column from the April 2007 issue of OPN. We’d love to get comments from anyone who remembers the 1983 CLEO or other OSA meetings from that era.

By Patricia Daukantas

We know Mars as the Red Planet, but what color is its sky? Early Viking lander photos from 1976 seemed to show a light blue sky, but a recalibration—and subsequent images from the Mars Pathfinder mission in 1997—changed the atmosphere to a light pink and then to a butterscotch color.

Such calibration depends on having a handy color-reference target in the field of view of the lander camera. Viking used an American flag, a symbol of the U.S. bicentennial celebration in 1976 (remember that?) and a small color grid, all posted on the outside of the spacecraft. NASA’s Phoenix lander, which touched down successfully on May 25, uses two color-calibration targets specially designed for the mission by scientists at the University of Central Florida.

UCF physics and astronomy professor Dan Britt and two of his students made the color chips, which range from white to royal blue (but no red), to aid spectroscopists in figuring out the true colors and composition of the Martian soil. The targets have built-in magnets to help keep them free of dust buildup, which was a problem on earlier missions.

The UCF team collaborated with a University of Florida chemistry professor and a group from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. For more information and a photo of the color-calibration target, check the UCF Web site.

2008-05 May, Astronomy, Imaging engineering, imaging, astronomy, camera, spectroscopy, color, calibration

By Patricia Daukantas

Imagine standing in New York and being able to peep through a telescope at people walking down the street in London. Or the other way around.

Nonsense, you say. The magnification required for such a ground-based telescope would be daunting. And then there’s the little matter of the curvature of the Earth over the 5,580-km distance.

However, a British artist has been able to build such a “telescope”—and even to make his creation look like a giant tube that was drilled through the Earth from one coast of the Atlantic Ocean to the other.

On May 20, the public-art project emerged from the banks of the East River in Brooklyn as a giant metal drill bit. By Thursday, the art installation looked like the end of a giant brass and wood telescope poking out of the ground. This “Telectroscope” is Paul St George’s conception of a 19^th-century idea that started when a reporter misspelled the word “electroscope” (a classic device for measuring static electricity) and writers such as Mark Twain spun tales of pictures that could be sent around by telegraph wires.

Although the “story” on St George’s Web site, telectroscope.net, implies that a giant straight-line hole was drilled through the Earth, the gizmo really relies on high-definition cameras linked by undersea fiber-optic cables, courtesy of the European Internet provider Tiscali.

Still, the Telectroscope gives passersby the illusion that they are looking through a giant Victorian spyglass—and they can actually wave at their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic.

CNN and the New York Times are among the media outlets sorting out the colorful facts and fiction about this artwork, which will be in operation in both London and New York until June 15. The Telectroscope fits in well with other “steampunk” movies, novels and fashions that have gained popularity in recent years.

2008-05 May, Optics and pop culture telescopes, optical communications, optics and pop culture

By Patricia Daukantas

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has helped astronomers find some of the “missing matter” that they have been seeking in the vast spaces between galaxies.

A team headed by two University of Colorado astronomers found the about half of the missing baryonic (normal) matter in regions between the galaxies, otherwise known as the intergalactic medium. The scientists made observations along sight-lines to 28 quasars—which are some of the most distant objects in the universe—and used the light from the quasars to examine the stuff in between them and us.

The analysis combined data from the HST’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) and a separate astronomical satellite, NASA’s Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer, to find filaments of hydrogen and highly ionized oxygen in the intergalactic regions. This matter is too hot to glow in the visible spectrum but too cool to give off X-rays.

More information is at HubbleSite, a multimedia Web site for educating the public about the many astronomical discoveries that have resulted from HST images and data since the space telescope’s launch in 1990.

Incidentally, the Colorado astronomers collected their STIS data before power problems shut that instrument down in August 2004. Later this year, the astronauts on the final HST servicing mission will attempt to repair the spectrograph’s electronics so that it can go back into service for several more years. A future issue of OPN will describe the servicing mission in more detail. 

By Patricia Daukantas

Polaroid lovers, you’re not alone.

Ever since the venerable Polaroid Corp. announced earlier this year that it will discontinue its remaining instant-film products, aficionados of the self-developing, one-of-a-kind prints have been banding together in cyberspace to celebrate the Polaroid as an artistic medium and share photos and tips.

A few days ago, the Rocky Mountain News in Denver (U.S.A.) paid tribute to Polaroids. Art writer Mary Voelz Chandler reminded readers of the many ways artists have used Polaroid film. In the same issue of that newspaper, a self-taught Polaroid photographer/artist ponders her technological future. The paper’s photography staff went out for one day with their old instant-film cameras and assembled the results into a video that includes a classic American television commercial for instant photography.

The New York-based blog Gothamist.com found a fellow Big Apple resident who has offered to send anybody, for a modest fee, an original Polaroid photo of something in New York City. Joe Howansky is also interested in trading his instant photos for Polaroids of exotic locales around the world.

The popular social-networking site LiveJournal has a community called the polaroids. More than 5,400 people have signed up to post their instant photos, old and new.

Another online community, Polanoid.net, was started by several Europeans who were, as they put it, “hungry for real analog, good smelling pictures in a digital world.” Users have uploaded more than 150,000 scanned, and sometimes manipulated, instant photos to that Web site.

Even CNN has gotten into the act. iReport.com—the cable news network’s beta site for “citizen journalism”—has a forum for sharing readers' favorite Polaroid snapshots. The photos that have already been uploaded include this poignant image of someone standing in front of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was slain 40 years ago. A floral wreath on the upstairs balcony marks the spot.

Finally, in case you’re wondering how much longer Polaroid instant film will be around, the company has provided this list of projected availabilities of film types, plus the expiration dates of the last batches of products.

2008-05 May, Optics history, Photography photography, camera, optics history, polaroid, imaging

By Patricia Daukantas

Once again, it’s time for CLEO/QELS and PhAST. These three conferences, taking place this week in California’s Silicon Valley, are just a few miles from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the site of the National Ignition Facility, where the world’s largest laser system is being built.

NIF is just one of the big, cool new projects highlighted at the 2008 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics and Quantum Electronics and Laser Science. Plenary speaker David Reitze of the University of Florida, who is featured in the current issue of OPN, awed the audience with a description of gravitational waves and the amazing precision that the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) needs to detect such waves.

Several representatives from the solar and solid-state lighting industries treated the CLEO/QELS media contingent to an exclusive discussion of new technologies for energy efficiency. Environmentally friendly technology is here to stay, according to Scott Clavenna, president and CEO of Greentech Media, because governments worldwide have accepted climate change as a fact and businesses and consumers are demanding green solutions. Fossil fuel prices will remain highly volatile for the foreseeable future and may eventually be subject to a carbon tax. Optoelectronics intersects with green technology in a number of areas, from closed-loop energy-control systems to solid-state lighting modules and telecom applications.

Richard Sandberg of JILA and the University of Colorado at Boulder (USA) has been chosen the winner of the annual OSA-New Focus/Bookham Student Award, which recognizes excellence in research by students. Sandberg used curvature correction and high-numerical-aperture imaging to demonstrate a soft-x-ray diffraction microscope with near-diffraction-limited resolution of 70 to 90 nm. Sandberg received the top prize of $5,000, while six other finalists from universities in the United States and United Kingdom garnered $1,500 each.

Coherent Inc. won this year’s PhAST/Laser Focus World Innovation Award for its optically pumped semiconductor laser technology, which has improved the treatment of one type of age-related macular degeneration. The 2008 Photonic Applications, Systems and Technologies conference had a large number of tracks on organic and inorganic LEDs, high-power lasers and solar-power technology.

We’ve got other technical highlights from CLEO/QELS and PhAST on the Web, and Susan Curtis of Optics.org has been blogging about the conferences.

Plenary speaker David Reitze of the University of Florida.

2008-05 May, CLEO/QELS, Energy, Lasers, CLEO cleo, cleo/qels, green, energy, lighting