By Patricia Daukantas

To celebrate Charles Kao’s share of the 2009 Nobel Prize in physics for his pioneering fiber optics work, the FiO/LS conference brought together industrial and academic researchers for a special symposium on optical communications.

OSA’s 1995 president, Tingye Li, kicked off the conference with a historical overview of the field that, as a longtime researcher at AT&T/Bell Laboratories (U.S.A.), he was well-positioned to witness and influence.

Noting that Kao’s Nobel came exactly 100 years after Guglielmo Marconi and Karl Ferdinand Braun won it for “wireless telegraphy,” Li said that the award to Kao fulfilled the original intent of the prize to recognize innovations that benefit human society. He listed Kao’s three great innovations:

• Conceptualizing optical fiber communications by proposing glass fibers as a viable data-transmitting medium;
• Having the insight that silica would be the low-loss medium of choice for future communications and rigorously verifying that experimentally, showing his understanding of the fundamental physics behind the application; and
• Traveling around the world to spread his “gospel” of optical communications until the industry began to take it seriously.

Li noted the characteristic engineering language of Kao’s first paper on the subject in 1966. He wrote that silica fibers may have a “large information capacity,” when the correct adjectival phrase might have turned out to be “astronomically large.” After all, the capacity of optical fiber systems has multiplied 1-million-fold since Corning Inc. developed the first truly low-loss fiber in 1970 and the telecom industry started its early field trials shortly thereafter.

Other symposium speakers included Peter Schultz of Corning (U.S.A.), David Payne of the University of Southampton (England) and Hiroshi Takahashi of NTT Photonics Laboratories (Japan). (Shultz recently wrote an article for OPN about the development of the first low-loss optical fibers.)

Current OSA director-at-large Neal Bergano of Tyco Electronics (U.S.A.) capped off the symposium by describing the types of cable armor, repeaters and large ships that go into building the planet’s undersea communications infrastructure. Hundreds of thousands of kilometers of optical cables now stretch across ocean and sea floors, either as direct links or branch-and-trunk networks. They certainly transmit digital data for far less cost than the $5 per word for telegrams sent via the first permanent transatlantic telegraphic cable in the late 1860s.

More FiO/LS Coverage

Today (Thursday) is the final day of the conference, with a number of invited talks on intriguing topics.

I haven’t forgotten the OSA Student Chapter members whose competition I photographed -- watch for coverage in an upcoming blog post. Also, I wrote about OSA Fellow Michal Lipson’s talk at the MWOSA gathering in OPN’s Bright Futures Blog.

Fiber optics, FiO/LS, Frontiers in Optics, Optics history, OSA optics, photonics, Optics & Photonics News, Charles Kao, OSA, The Optical Society, Frontiers in Optics, optical communications, fiber optics, Patricia Daukantas

By Patricia Daukantas

Halloween is the season of ghosts, goblins and vampires … so why not add some spooky quantum entanglements to the mix? On a cloudy, damp morning in Rochester (N.Y., U.S.A.), the plenary speakers at OSA’s 94th annual meeting, Frontiers in Optics, took the audience on a tour of Bell inequalities, wild biomolecules and other scientific treats.

This year’s Ives Medalist, OSA 2007 President Joe Eberly, used elementary trigonometric identities (remember those?) to demonstrate a seeming contradiction in a thought experiment about a polarizing interferometer. Eberly, a longtime professor at the University of Rochester, solved the conundrum by showing that the photons were entangled in what is now known as a Bell state.

Measuring degrees of photon entanglement is one of Eberly’s recent interests. He noted that Erwin Schrödinger introduced the notion of entanglement in 1935 -- and, 75 years later, scientists still don’t have a lot of quantitative answers about it. This is “a guarantee of permanent employment for a physicist,” he said, generating a ripple of chuckles among the audience.

One of the two winners of the American Physical Society’s Arthur M. Schawlow Prize, Henry Kapteyn of JILA (University of Colorado, U.S.A.), paid homage to the award’s namesake. “It was clear he liked to point lasers at things and blow them up, and that’s mostly what we do,” he said. Fortunately, most of the high-energy (and soft-X-ray) lasers he talked about haven’t exploded, and he predicted that there are excellent prospects for generating hard X-ray laser beams from tabletop devices in the near future. His wife and co-prize-winner, Margaret Murnane of JILA, will speak at tonight’s APS Laser Science banquet.

Plenary speaker Steven Block, a professor of physics and biology at Stanford University (U.S.A.), took the audience on a tour of “riboswitches,” non-coding messenger RNA strands that control gene expression by changing their structure when they selectively bind to a signal molecule. In evolutionary terms, this is probably the earliest form of molecular control at the cellular level, but it was poorly understood until scientists could start manipulating the molecules with optical tweezers. (Attendees of CLEO/QELS 2010 in May might remember Block’s blues mandolin performance.)

The final plenary speaker, Alain Aspect of the Institut d’Optique (France), gave a history lesson on the Hanbury Brown and Twiss interferometry experiment of the mid-1950s and its relevance to modern-day quantum optics.

Checking the Efficacy of Breast-Cancer Therapy

Can oncologists deduce the efficacy of breast-cancer treatment as early as one day after the start of chemotherapy? According to Albert Cerussi of the Beckman Laser Institute (U.S.A.), this can happen, thanks to a technique called diffuse optical spectroscopic imaging (DOSI).

Traditional “adjuvant therapy” for breast cancer calls for surgery first, followed by a round of chemotherapy. Oncologists are now moving to “neo-adjuvant therapy,” in which the chemo comes first -- making it even more important to monitor the patient’s response to the powerful drugs.

DOSI works in the near-infrared window of 650 to 1,000 nm; those wavelengths penetrate tissue relatively well, although the photons take a “random walk” through the tissue (hence the “diffuse” part of the imaging). Instead of getting the black-and-white patterns of a traditional mammogram, DOSI provides spectral information about tumor biomarkers such as oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin.

Researchers first studied DOSI at the midpoint of chemotherapy, when oncologists usually assess the patient and decide whether to switch therapies. But the researchers from Beckman and the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center (both part of the University of California at Irvine) found that they could detect changes in the biomarkers one week and even one day after the start of chemotherapy.

According to Cerussi, scientists are even studying whether the technique could predict whether chemo will help a particular patient even before the treatment starts, but they are still trying to understand the biological process behind that. In the near future, researchers will look for additional biomarkers, shrink the size of the equipment, and join a clinical trial involving four other cancer centers.

(Note to readers of OPN’s Twitter feed, @OPNmagazine: Cerussi’s talk was the one I chose out of eight simultaneous invited talks at the start of the afternoon sessions. It was a tough call -- the other topics included luminescent solar concentrators, laser refractive surgery for cataracts and long-term monitoring of buried fiber-optic cables.)

Industrial Physics Forum

This event, sponsored by the Corporate Associates of both OSA and the American Institute of Physics, drew large crowds to several talks -- particularly the one by quantum cascade laser pioneer Federico Capasso of Harvard University. On Monday, the forum covered a range of biomedical and environmental applications of lasers.

An Earth-observing lidar satellite called CALIPSO (for “Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations”) has been in orbit since April 2006, and Carl Weimer (Ball Aerospace, U.S.A.) reviewed its ongoing engineering and science results.

As I described in an OPN article last year, CALIPSO is part of an “A-Train” of environmental satellites in the same orbit, with roughly 15 minutes of spacing between them. Its dual-wavelength (532 and 1,064 nm) lasers collect data in a 70-m-wide “curtain” from ground level to about 40 km altitude.

So far, the satellite has collected 6.6 terabytes of data from 2.6 billion laser shots, Weimer said. Its estimated particle sizes within cloud distributions provide important input for scientists’ models of global atmospheric circulation.

The Industrial Physics Forum is concluding this morning with sessions on lasers’ applications in metrology and other “frontiers of physics” areas.

The Day Ahead: Tuesday

This afternoon, brand-new OSA Honorary Member Arthur Ashkin will speak first at a symposium honoring his pioneering work with optical tweezers. The FiO/LS exhibit hall will open, and OSA student chapters will kick off their lesson plan competition. Two other events of particular interest to young professionals are a public-policy forum and the Minorities and Women in OSA (MWOSA) tea. Finally, we’ll all learn who won the OSA officer elections for 2011.

2010-10 October, Applied optics, Biomedical optics, FiO/LS, Lasers OSA, university of rochester, fio, biomedical optics, industrial applications, Patricia Daukantas, the Optical Society, quantum entanglement, CALIPSO, LaserFest

By Christina Folz

Greetings from San Jose! My trip here for OSA’s 91^st annual meeting has been a whirlwind of technical sessions, pubs meetings and receptions. The one sour note for me may have resulted from consuming an ill-advised combination of wine and beer on Monday night, when I hit both the reception to honor 2007 OSA President Joseph Eberly at the Silicon Valley Capitol Club and the student reception at the nearby Tiki lounge. It’s fun to think about how OSA’s student members, many of whom were wearing leis and red T-shirts with the slogan “If this shirt looks blue to you, you’re moving too fast,” may represent the next generation of OSA leadership sipping wine at a president’s reception.

A highlight of the meeting was Monday’s plenary session and awards ceremony, which featured talks from Eli Yablonovitch, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and John L. Hall, a Nobel laureate and OSA honorary member.

OPN recently published profiles of both Yablonovitch and Hall. Going into Monday’s plenary session, I had formed distinct impressions of both based on those articles. When I thought of Yablonovitch, the word that came to mind for me was “prescient.” As the OPN article noted, Yablonovitch has a demonstrated ability to predict upcoming trends in optics and technology.

His talk on Monday reinforced my notions. Yablonovitch discussed how 2-D nanophotonic structures present a tremendous opportunity for the integration of optics with electronics, resulting in the design of photonics into the standard CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) process. Although more research is needed, particularly in the area of developing a light source in silicon, “silicon photonics is on its way,” said Yablonovitch. “The precision of photolithography is mind-boggling at 3-4 nm wavelengths.”

Indeed, Luxtera Inc. has recently announced that it has fabricated an electrical connector that plugs into a network card; it contains all-optics inside the plug. The 40 Gb/s optical active guide is currently being tested by customers and will be in mass production within several months.

When it came time for John Hall’s presentation, I was ready for something unconventional and fun. After all, the first words attributed to Hall in OPN’s profile of him were: “Physics is fun”—the same statement he used in the essay portion of his application to the National Research Council in 1961.

Well, as I learned on Monday, Hall thinks that optical frequency combs—the method for optical frequency measurement for which he won a portion of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics—are, in his words, totally fun. Hall’s enthusiasm for his work is palpable and infectious. Unfortunately for me, much of his talk was also way over my head!

Hall is a senior fellow emeritus of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and an adjoint fellow of JILA. His work has concentrated on improving the precision and accuracy with which lasers can produce a specific frequency and the stability with which they can hold that frequency. He has helped to develop a broad range of laser applications, including precision spectroscopy for physical and chemical analysis, new tests of fundamental physical laws, and measurement and redefinition of the speed of light.

He is an incredibly humble man— something I noticed about him when we were preparing our profile as well. During his talk, he spent a great deal of time acknowledging and thanking his family and fellow physicists, including Ted Hansch, one of his co-Nobel laureates who came up with the idea for the frequency comb in 1977, Ali Javan, developer of the first He-Ne laser, and Herbert Walther, a renowned scientist and educator who made pioneering contributions to quantum optics.

Speaking of Walther, OSA President Joe Eberly announced at the plenary the establishment of the Herbert Walther award, which will recognize distinguished contributions in quantum optics and atomic physics as well as leadership in the international scientific community. The award, which is jointly sponsored by OSA and the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft, honors the late Walther for his tireless efforts to bring together scientists from all over the world. The first award will be presented in 2009; nominations will be accepted next year.

A final note: This year marks the 90^th anniversary of the publication of the first issue of the Journal of the Optical Society of America. We celebrated the occasion at the member reception last evening. Joe Eberly and previous JOSA editor Joseph Goodman thanked the many authors, reviewers, readers, and staff who have played a role in making JOSA—including JOSA A and B and all the other OSA journals—the premier optics publications that they are today. In OPN’s November and December history columns, we will include a list of former JOSA editor David MacAdam’s favorite articles. Meanwhile, check out the JOSA anniversary page on InfoBase to learn more about the history of the journal, download the first issue from 1917, or enjoy free access to the journal’s top cited articles.

Also stay tuned for Pat Daukantas’s January feature article in OPN reporting on the technical findings that came out of FiO.

2007-09 September, FiO/LS, OSA fio, osa, nobel laureates, frequency comb