By Patricia Daukantas

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which has been raging since April 20 in the Gulf of Mexico, has the potential to pollute the region’s air as well as the water. Various optical technologies are tracking air quality in the region.

For example, one miniature fiber-optic spectrometer has been set up in southern Mississippi near the Gulf coast to measure levels of benzene, toluene, sulfur dioxide and other substances. Real-time data is being posted online at http://fenceline.org/test/map.php. According to this report, Argos Scientific custom-configured the monitoring station using the spectrometer from Ocean Optics. A second Argos system is going to the University of North Alabama for future studies of Gulf-area samples.

For a more complete picture of air quality around the Gulf Coast, see the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s page at http://www.epa.gov/bpspill/air.html, which provides some actual data files. You can also get real-time ozone and particulate-matter information from http://www.airnow.gov and http://gulfcoast.airnowtech.org. None of these sites, however, really get into details about the sensors and/or spectrometers that collected these data.

So far, the air out there doesn’t look too bad. Let’s hope it doesn’t get any worse.

2010-06 June, Applied optics, Miscellaneous Optics spectroscopy, disasters, atmospheric optics, energy

By Patricia Daukantas

Instead of a long blog post, I’m going to post links to several optics-related news items that caught my eye this week.

• A German photonics scientist, Michael Grätzel, has won the Millennium Prize of the Technology Academy Finland for his role in developing dye-sensitized solar cells that mimic photosynthesis. Grätzel heads the Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. A Web graphic illustrates the principle behind these so-called Grätzel cells, which have been recently commercialized.

• NIST Tech Beat, a website of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, writes about a recent Optics Express article describing a “dark-pulse” laser. It’s a semiconductor infrared laser that makes dips in light intensity, instead of bursts of light. The scientists at NIST and JILA in Boulder, Colo. (U.S.A.) say that the technology may be useful in signal processing and optical networking.

• A multinational team has used pump-probe spectroscopy to measure electron localization in H₂ and D₂ molecules on the attosecond scale. Of course, this work would not be possible without the development of attosecond lasers. G. Sansone et al. report on this work in the June 10 issue of Nature.

• Finally, Light Reading reports on the impact World Cup fever is going to have on worldwide network traffic. And you thought you were the only one waiting for that “buffering” message to go away so that you can watch your favorite team online….

2010-06 June, Miscellaneous Optics optical networking, lasers, solar power

By Patricia Daukantas

Two telescope-building astronomers who have won OSA awards for optical engineering are among this year’s winners of the Kavli Prize for Astrophysics.

The Kavli Prizes, worth $1 million each, are bestowed every two years in the fields of astrophysics, neuroscience and nanoscience – areas that didn’t really exist when the Nobel Prizes were founded.

Jerry Nelson, J. Roger P. Angel and Raymond N. Wilson shared the astrophysics prize for their contributions to the technology behind some of the world’s largest telescopes.

Nelson, of the Center for Adaptive Optics at the University of California at Santa Cruz (U.S.A.), served as project scientist for the twin 10-m-aperture Keck Telescopes on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea. These telescopes use his design of lightweight hexagonal mirror segments with active controls to keep the optics perfectly aligned. His pioneering design is being used in other large telescopes now under construction. An OSA member, Nelson received the 1996 Joseph Fraunhofer Award/Robert M. Burley Prize from OSA for his contributions to optical engineering.

Angel, director of the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab at the University of Arizona, took a different approach to the design of large, lightweight telescope mirrors: casting them as a single unit in a giant spinning furnace that cools slowly. The resulting mirrors have a near-parabolic top surface and a honeycomb structure underneath. He received OSA’s Fraunhofer Award/Burley Prize in 2007 for his body of work, which includes fiber-fed spectroscopy and solar photovoltaic technology.

The third winner of the astrophysics Kavli Prize, Raymond N. Wilson, formerly of the European Southern Observatory in Germany and Imperial College London in England, developed the computer-controlled actuation system for active optics, which is used in many of the world’s largest observatories.

Five scientists from U.S. universities and industrial research centers shared the Kavli Prizes in nanoscience and neuroscience. The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters made the prize announcement this morning. Funding for the prizes comes from comes from the Kavli Foundation.

2010-06 June, Astronomy, Astrophysics astronomy, news, telescopes, astrophysics, osa, honors, awards, engineering

By Patricia Daukantas

CLEO knows how to throw a party!

Fifty years to the day—and roughly the hour—after Theodore “Ted” Maiman fired up the first laser, a sizable crowd of CLEO/QELS attendees listened raptly to a series of historical recollections from some of the early laser pioneers and other distinguished speakers.

If Ted Maiman had been here, of course, he would have had pride of place, but he died three years ago this month. Instead, his widow, Kathleen Maiman of Vancouver (Canada), recalled his professional focus and his personal warmth.

“Advances often flow in small steps, but with the laser, it was a quantum leap, a giant leap,” Kathleen Maiman said. She said that her husband was a maverick and a contrarian who did not buy into Arthur Schawlow’s widely believed 1959 statement that a ruby laser would not work.

“Ted believed it would be very difficult to make a laser, but not impossible,” Kathleen Maiman said. With his solid background in both physics and engineering—his father had been an electrical engineer who let the boy tinker in his lab for fun—he built a successful laser weighing just a few pounds in a project that cost Hughes Research Labs only $50,000, including salaries. Because of Maiman’s success, Ali Javan has said that IBM Corp. revived his multi-million-dollar gas laser project.

Ted Maiman disliked the headline that followed the Hughes press conference about the first laser—“L.A. Man Invents Death Ray.” Ironically, the laser has gone on to be a healing ray in ophthalmology and a helpful ray in other areas, such as driving the Internet, cutting through steel, manipulating single atoms and even amusing pet cats.

“Ted had to cast off conventional wisdom to follow his own convictions,” said Kathleen Maiman. “Ted’s ruby laser has changed the world with elegance, simplicity and practicality.”

Jeff Hecht, an author of many technology-related books and a frequent contributor to OPN, reviewed some of the early maser-related work in the 1950s. He compared Maiman’s invention to Chihiro Kikuchi’s 1957 ruby maser: it weighed 2.5 tons, required liquid-helium cooling to 4 K and was the size of a large desk.

By the time of the first Quantum Electronics Conference in September 1959—where Schawlow made his negative pronouncement about ruby as a lasing medium—people were beginning to doubt whether the laser would ever work, Hecht said. That prompted Maiman to do his own preliminary experiments with rubies, and unlike other scientists, he found that ruby’s fluorescence was nearly 100 percent.

Once Maiman assembled the components of his ruby laser, it worked the first time he tried it—“no small accomplishment in laser experiments,” Hecht said. (Or in many other scientific experiments, I might add.) Maiman’s design was a whole new approach to laser design: pulsed operation, high gain, well engineered and easy for other researchers to replicate.

OSA’s 1999 President, Tony Siegman of Stanford University—a member of the steering committee for that September 1959 conference -- reviewed some of the pre-maser developments that made masers and lasers possible, such as the invention of closed microwave cavities and the Fabry-Pérot interferometer.

“Maiman was imbued with that ‘just get it done’ spirit you find here in California,” Siegman said.

In the early 1960s, laser research progressed rapidly; Siegman paid tribute to the crucial mode calculations by Gardner Fox and Tingye Li, which suggested that curved mirrors would lower the losses in confocal cavities. Ironically, in the 1940s and 1950s, Fox had create the first microwave relay links for long-distance phone calls, and by the time he died in 1992, the laser technology on which they had worked had made those microwave relays obsolete. (Li, another OSA Past President, is still living in Colorado and skiing with his grandchildren, Siegman noted.)

When Maiman published about his first ruby laser, the scientific community was astounded because of simplicity of the components used, the characteristics of the energy levels of the laser transition, and the pulsed-by-flash-lamp type of laser excitation, said Orazio Svelto of the Politecnico di Milano, Italy.

OSA Honorary Member Nicolaas Bloembergen, a 1981 winner of the Nobel Prize for contributions to laser spectroscopy, gave a series of personal anecdotes about the early days of lasers and the people involved. He and his wife, Huberta, met Charles and Frances Townes at an award banquet, and Frances Townes showed off the ruby pendant her husband had made for her. But when Huberta Bloembergen asked her husband when he would give her a pendant made of his laser material, he had to reply: “I work with cyanide.”

I had a chance to greet Nico and Huberta Bloembergen during the coffee break. He recently celebrated his 90^th birthday, and the pair got married 60 years ago.

2010-05 May, 2010-06 June, CLEO/QELS, Lasers, Lasers, CLEO lasers, cleo, cleo10, laser history, laserfest, cleo/qels, optics, quantum electronics