By Patricia Daukantas

I can’t let my coverage of FiO/LS end without mentioning the wonderful talk that OSA Honorary Member Arthur Ashkin gave at the special symposium organized in his honor.

Ashkin, now 88 years old and retired from Alcatel-Lucent/Bell Laboratories (U.S.A.), pioneered the notion of moving microparticles with laser light, back in the days when lasers were the new thing on the lab bench. His work formed the basis for optical tweezers and, eventually, the atom-cooling and laser-trapping work that garnered three other OSA Honorary Members their Nobel Prize in 1997.

In his autobiographical speech, Ashkin--who still has traces of the accent of his native Brooklyn, N.Y.--showed his warm and sometimes mildly self-deprecating humor. Yes, he said, he holds degrees from “all these fancy schools” like Columbia and Cornell universities, but it took him seven years just to get his bachelor’s degree.

That wasn’t entirely of his own doing. As he entered Columbia, World War II was starting and the university, whose physics department had people like Sidney Millman, Willis Lamb and Polykarp Kusch, founded a radiation laboratory with, as Ashkin put it, “all this new equipment free from the government.” Millman taught the new undergraduate about magnetrons – “glass, brass and sealing wax” – and then Ashkin got drafted at age 19.

“I’m a sophomore, how important can I be to the war effort?” Ashkin asked rhetorically. But the folks at Columbia got him into the Army’s enlisted reserve, so that he could work as a staff member, and he eventually built a megawatt magnetron.

Once Ashkin got to Cornell as a graduate student, he said, he took no solid-state physics or optics courses. “All I took was nuclear physics because there were all these guys from Los Alamos [the Manhattan Project, which built the first nuclear weapons],” he said. He took the first quantum mechanics class taught by the then-future Nobel Prize winner Richard P. Feynman. Ashkin added: “The stories I could tell, if I had the time…”

Once hired at Bell Labs, he was told he could do anything he wanted to do, but he still ended up working on microwave tubes for a while. “At Bell Labs they wanted you to do great work, but you had to find your own way,” he said.

In the late 1960s, Ashkin attended a talk about “runners” and “bouncers,” or tiny balls moving around due to heating. That got him thinking about radiation pressure, and he started thinking about moving even tinier particles with the light from laser beams, and then experimenting in earnest.

By the time Ashkin was writing his first paper on the subject, he was wondering whether the laser beams could trap atoms, molecules and microscopic living things. “So I put all that into the paper and got credit for it,” he added. His first experiments with trying to move bacteria around killed them--he dubbed it “opticution”--but eventually he and his colleagues learned how to keep them alive while moving them with infrared beams.

You can read more about Ashkin’s pioneering efforts in a March 2010 feature article in OPN.

Like a good entertainer, Ashkin knows how to leave his audiences wanting more. He wound up his talk by saying that during his 15-year retirement, he has been experimenting with solar power, and he thinks he has found away of getting energy from the Sun more cheaply than burning fossil fuels.“I’m writing a paper for Science, and if I tell you about it they won’t publish it,” he concluded. “So stay tuned.”

The Newest OSA Honorary Member

At its meeting during FiO/LS, the OSA board of directors selected James P. Gordon as the Society’s newest Honorary Member. Regular readers of OPN may recall his article for the May 2010 issue of OPN--the special “Lasers at 50” issue--in which he described his work on the first maser with another OSA Honorary Member, Charles H. Townes.

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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.

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By Patricia Daukantas, OPN Contributing Writer

LaserFest--the yearlong celebration of the 50th anniversary of the first laser--is not over yet. At this year’s FiO/LS meeting, LaserFest has a strong presence in the exhibit hall.

Since arriving in Rochester (N.Y., U.S.A.), I’ve been hearing a lot about the Laser Maze, so by the time the exhibit hall opened yesterday morning, I could hardly wait to try it. The University of Rochester’s student chapter of OSA developed the maze with a grant from the LaserFest program. Previously the students had set it up at the Rochester Museum and Science Center, but they moved it over to the OSA meeting for the enjoyment of attendees.

The premise of the Laser Maze will be familiar to anyone who has ever seen one of those bank-robbery or jewel-heist movies. A laser and a light sensor make up part of a complete circuit. Interrupt the laser beam and the circuit breaks.

In this case, the circuit was powering a small music player, so breaking the beam stopped the music (instead of setting off an alarm like in the movies). The laser beam bounced side to side several times off parallel mirrors close to the floor, so the maze walker had to step through the gaps between the reflected beams.

Of course, in the movies the audience sees the laser beams from the side, thanks to either smoke or computer-generated effects. No such luck with the Laser Maze, however. The LaserFest people had a small theatrical “smoke” machine, but due to a combination of the bright ceiling lights and the ventilation in the exhibit hall, the particles did not linger long in the air. Thus, the maze walker had to look for tiny red dots on the mirrors and imagine where the beam might have gone, based on equal angles of incidence and reflection.

Since I didn’t want to embarrass anyone else, I had someone take photos of me trying to step through the maze.Here I’m starting off on the right foot.

I’m home safe after figuring out the first beam path.

Another step, probably higher than it needs to be.

Dang! I just nicked that last horizontal beam!

To make the maze even more challenging, the Rochester chapter set up a second set of reflecting beams and mirrors … vertically. Technically, to complete the maze, one had to get through both the horizontal and vertical sections without interrupting the recorded music. However, I probably would have had to slide myself on the floor to get through that maze, and I wasn’t feeling quite that acrobatic.

OSA Student Chapter Competition 2010

At last year’s FiO/LS, OSA student chapters built miniature solar-powered cars and raced them. This year, they were given a different challenge: to create an educational tabletop exhibit to teach young people about one or more principles of optics.

Yesterday I visited several of the chapters’ tables, but since the competition is continuing into today, I’ll write up more details for tomorrow’s blog entry.

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