By Christina Folz, OPN Managing Editor

On August 6, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) continued the 2010 LaserFest celebration with its own event highlighting everyone's favorite technology this year. The event showcased the work of three OSA Fellows--Alan Willner, who works on optical communications at the University of Southern California; Margaret Murnane, who is studying high-peak-power physics with lasers at the University of Colorado, and Richard Miles, a Princeton professor who spoke about the role of lasers in aerospace. Two other laser experts--Robert Jones and Gary Teraney--described the important role that lasers are playing in the defense industry and in medicine. Each of the participants had been funded by AFOSR as grad students and went on to become distinguished leaders in the laser field.

For those who missed the event, or who simply sought more info, yesterday the AFOSR held a "bloggers roundtable" moderated by Howard Schlossberg, the program manager at AFOSR, to discuss the event and answer additional questions about the state-of-the art in laser technology. Schlossberg was joined by several of the event participants, including Willner and Miles.

And for those who missed THAT (including this humble blogger), you're in luck: A podcast and transcript of the roundtable are posted on the Department of Defense's blog. 

Schlossberg emphasized the importance of solid-state lasers in particular as pivotal to modern laser research and technology. "The primary emphasis by us and by others as well is in solid-state lasers, either on bulk solids, slabs pumped with semi-conducted lasers, or in optical fiber lasers," he said. He also called medical and materials processing two of the biggest application areas of lasers these days.

And don't worry--LaserFest is far from over. "At meetings, they'll have demonstrations and displays," Schlossberg said. "If you get on the LaserFest website, you'll see some of the terrific movies of early times." 

Party on!  

2010-08 August, Applied optics, Laserfest, Lasers, Optics history Laserfest, lasers, defense, AFOSR, technology, OSA, OSA Fellows, optics, optics history

By Patricia Daukantas

For the past decade, astronomers have used laser guide star (LGS) adaptive-optics systems to remove the blurring caused by atmospheric turbulence above ground-based telescopes. Such systems, however, have always faced one restriction: an extremely narrow field of sharp viewing.

A team from the University of Arizona (Tucson, U.S.A.) has managed to widen that sharp field by developing a five-laser guiding system for the MMT telescope on Mount Hopkins in southern Arizona. The astronomers report on their system in the August 5 issue of Nature.

Michael Hart, of the university’s Steward Observatory, and colleagues wanted to study aging star clusters at near-infrared wavelengths (1.25 to 2.2 μm). One such cluster, dubbed M3, nearly fills the 110-arcsecond-wide field of the MMT’s infrared camera.

The researchers arranged five 4-W, 532-nm pulsed lasers in a pentagon and projected them from a small telescope behind the MMT’s adaptive secondary mirror. A combination of three sensors detects the aberrations in the Rayleigh-backscattered light coming back to the telescope, estimates the aberration from ground-level turbulence and directs the secondary mirror to correct the aberrations.

On a night when the native “seeing,” or point-spread-function diameter of stellar images, at the MMT was only 0.7 arcseconds, the astronomers improved it to 0.3 arcseconds over a 2-arcminute-wide field of view – roughly the same as the Hubble Space Telescope gets with its most recent upgrades, but with a bigger aperture to gather more light.

Astronomers are now developing a similar system for the Large Binocular Telescope on Arizona’s Mount Graham.

2010-08 August, Astronomy, Lasers astronomy, lasers, telescopes, adaptive optics

By Patricia Daukantas

Last week, Charles H. Townes passed yet another milestone: he turned 95 years old.

Townes, now of the University of California at Berkeley (U.S.A.), is of course most famous in the optics community for his fundamental contributions to laser theory:

• The development of the first maser with James Gordon and Herbert Zeiger in 1953, as Gordon recounted in a recent OPN feature article; and
• The principles behind the optical maser, or laser, published by Townes and his brother-in-law, Arthur Schawlow, in December 1958.

Along the way, he’s worked at Bell Labs and three prominent universities, served on various U.S. government committees and think tanks, held a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fulbright Scholarship, and won the Templeton Prize for contributing to the understanding of religion.

As we’ve noted in past OPN blog posts, Townes is still active in astrophysical research. So far in 2010, he and his colleagues have published two articles relating to Berkeley’s Infrared Spatial Interferometer, a three-telescope system with high spectral resolution. This year, which is the 50^th anniversary of the first working laser, he’s been invited to speak at many scientific conferences, including a special historical symposium at CLEO/QELS 2010.

We should also note that 2010 marks two other milestones for Townes. It was 40 years ago, in 1970, that Townes was named an OSA Honorary Member. And it was 50 years ago that Townes, along with 14 other physicists, chemists, engineers and physicians, was named a representative of “U.S. Scientists” for Time magazine’s 1960 “Men of the Year” (now "Person of the Year") issue. Townes and bubble-chamber inventor Donald A. Glaser are the two surviving members of that august ensemble.

Townes and his wife of 69 years, Frances, have four daughters. We wish him a Happy Belated Birthday and much joy with his family.

2010-08 August, Astronomy, Astrophysics, Lasers, Optics history charles hard townes, astrophysics, birthdays, nobelists, nobel laureates