By Patricia Daukantas

In this age of instant telecommunications and social media, one of the reasons why people still attend professional conferences is to run into old friends and catch up with them. I certainly experienced this at CLEO:2011 as I ran into OSA staff members, OPN contributors and past OSA presidents at various sessions and the conference reception.

It’s also gratifying to see people I’ve written about for OPN in the past and learn about their current work. For example, last year I wrote in the Scatterings column about a three-dimensional, near-infrared “invisibility cloak” created by a team at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany. This week at CLEO, Joachim Fischer of KIT reported that his group has pushed the technology to the edge of the visible realm by making a 3-D cloak that works for 700-nm light.

To build their near-IR cloak, the KIT researchers used a fabrication technique called direct laser writing to build a tiny “woodpile” photonic crystal. Because a visible-light cloak would require even finer detail, the team incorporated stimulated-emission-depletion (STED) fluorescence microscopy into the laser-writing fabrication process. The resulting cloak worked not just with monochromatic light from a Ti:sapphire laser, but also with a white-light source passed through a red filter.

“Seeing the cloaking action with one’s own eyes is an amazing experience,” the KIT team wrote in the CLEO proceedings. We couldn’t agree more. Their paper, with Fischer as the lead author, is now available in the “Early Posting” section of Optics Letters.

This blog can’t possibly cover everything that has been happening at CLEO this week. If you hunger for more information, point your browser to the CLEO social media hub and drink in the postings. The OSA booth at CLEO has a Legislative Action Center station where attendees can express their views about U.S. science funding issues, and you don’t have to be onsite to use that website, either. Finally, the CLEO:2011 proceedings will be published on OSA’s Optics InfoBase in the near future.

CLEO/QELS, Lasers, CLEO

By Patricia Daukantas

This year’s CLEO conference features such a wide array of interesting scientific findings and technological applications that it’s hard to know where to begin this blog post. So I’ll just dive right in.

The Dawn of "Nuclear Photonics"

Ever heard of “nuclear photonics”? It may sound like a bit of an oxymoron, since photonic inventions and techniques, such as laser spectroscopy, are associated with physics on the atomic level. However, if the folks at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (U.S.A.) have their way, super-high-energy beams with laser origins could solve some extremely practical national-security problems.

According to Livermore scientist Chris Barty, researchers at the lab are learning how to make tunable gamma-ray beams by Compton scattering of laser beams off relativistic electrons. The Livermore people call these “mono-energetic gamma rays,” or “MEGa-rays.”

At the 2-MeV photon energy range, MEGa-ray beams would be at least 15 orders of magnitude brighter than synchrotron light, which has its maximum brightness between 10 and 100 keV. Such brilliant beams have the energy to probe not just atoms, but the nuclei within those atoms.

Nuclear resonance fluorescence (NRF) is analogous to the more familiar atomic resonance fluorescence, but it depends on the number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus, so that it can ferret out the spectral signature of isotopes. The narrowband MEGa-rays could selectively excite NRF transitions, and, with the appropriate detector, could provide precise assays of the isotopic content of, and isotopic distribution within, bulk material.

Although no NRF imaging has been done yet, simulations indicate that MEGa-rays could someday help detect highly enriched uranium in the 48 million cargo containers that enter the United States annually, Barty said.

Today, two U.S. laboratories and one in Japan have second-generation MEGa-ray sources for proof-of-principle experiments, Barty said. The next step is to miniaturize the technology – it needs to be able to fit into a truck to be practical for homeland security applications. Livermore is building a nuclear photonics lab for creating a next-generation source that combines compact X-band linac technology from the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory with Livermore’s high-power diode-pumped lasers.

Second Plenary Session

CLEO traditionally has two plenary sessions, and the 2011 conference was no exception. While Monday night’s plenary talks told of technological applications, the Wednesday morning speakers addressed fundamental science.

Mordechai (Moti) Segev of Israel outlined the pioneering work that he and his colleagues have done in Anderson localization of light. A fellow CLEO blogger, James Van Howe, summed up his talk better than I could have done. I liked how Segev, instead of ending his speech with a list of “conclusions,” listed the possibilities for future research in his field. These open questions include localization in honeycomb lattices, localization with entangled photons, sub-wavelength localization of light and solitons in disordered media.

Likewise, Susumu Noda of Japan presented a thoroughly detailed account of photonic crystal theory and experiments as they have developed over the past 20 years. Although photonic crystals occur in nature – as in the scales on the wings of a beautiful blue butterfly – human-made crystals were still in the microwave regime in the early 1990s. Progress has indeed come very rapidly.

CLEO/QELS, Lasers, CLEO, OSA nuclear photonics, Anderson Localization, CLEO, CLEO:2011, photonic crystals, Moti Segev, Susumu Noda, optics, Optics and Photonics News

By Patricia Daukantas

The weather outside the Baltimore (U.S.A.) Convention Center has been varying wildly, from warm and summery to cool and rainy. Indoors, however, the atmosphere of the CLEO:2011 conference was steadily abuzz with exciting applications of the latest photonics technologies.

Ultraviolet LEDs Can Disinfect Water

Although CLEO is primarily a laser conference, some tracks focused on other photonics technologies, such as photovoltaics and quantum computing. Following a joint symposium on semiconductor ultraviolet (UV) lasers and LEDs, a session reviewed several practical applications of UV LEDs.

One task for which these devices are particularly suited is the removal of harmful germs and other contaminants from drinking water. Gordon Knight, a research manager at Trojan Technologies (Canada), explained that UV light penetrates the cell membranes of bacteria, viruses and protozoa and permanently alters their DNA so the critters can’t reproduce and infect humans. UV rays can also break down organic contaminant molecules, as long as the molecular absorption spectrum matches the output of the UV sources.

Water treatment specialists are primarily interested in the UV-C spectrum (200 to 280 nm), in which the peak absorption spectrum of germ DNA falls, Knight said. The industry’s workhorse has been the low-pressure mercury arc lamp, which has a strong emission peak at 254 nm. However, solid-state UV sources could be more energy-efficient and could maintain their steady output for five times longer than the mercury lamps.

Although some technical challenges remain in the development of UV-C LEDs--namely, cost and the need to boost individual chip output above 5 mW--Knight is confident that these sources will provide efficient instant-on operation for future water treatment devices, both in municipal plants and perhaps even in household-sized systems.

IARPA: An Opportunity, Not a Misspelling

You’ve heard of DARPA, but what about IARPA? The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, a new branch of the U.S. government’s spy agencies, recently started searching for “high-risk, high-payoff” research programs to boost America’s intelligence-gathering efforts.

According to IARPA official Michael C. King, the agency is especially interested in significant advances in techniques to gather biometric data from distant, moving human subjects. Successful proposals require not just a good idea, but also a capable leader to guide the research project. One U.S. team followed King’s talk with a discussion of their own technique for so-called “standoff biometric identification” of people. According to Brian C. Redman of Lockheed Martin (U.S.A.), Fourier transform profilometry involves bouncing fringes from an 808-nm laser off the subject, capturing it and its two-dimensional fast Fourier transform, then doing an inverse transform and merging it with the original data. The laser pulses are eye-safe and, with a duration of 100 microseconds, short enough to freeze motion at a brisk walking speed of 1.5 m/s. The near-infrared light can even “see” through most sunglasses, Redman said.

Applied optics, Biomedical optics, CLEO/QELS, Energy, Lasers, Lasers, CLEO, OSA, Photovoltaics lasers, cleo, the optical society, optics & photonics news, quantum computing, biomedical optics, photovoltaics

By Patricia Daukantas

Every scientific advancement has a story behind it. Telecommunications fibers and optical coherence tomography (OCT) are no different. Donald Keck and James Fujimoto--the first two CLEO:2011 plenary speakers--did a great job of telling those true tales.

Donald Keck, a retired Corning Inc. (U.S.A.) scientist who participated in the development of the first low-loss optical fiber, attributed the telecom boom to a “syzygy” of rapid-fire technological developments four decades ago. In addition to that first practical fiber, the earliest computer-network experiments, the room-temperature laser chip and the computer chip all appeared between 1969 and 1971.

Evoking the original notion of the laser as a “solution looking for a problem,” Keck drew chuckles by reminding the audience of schemes for laser cutting of trees, laser-made nipples for baby bottles and Arthur Schawlow’s “laser eraser” for typists. Early proposals for laser telecommunications--by sending light beams down 2-in.-wide coaxial cables--were not much more practical.

Fortunately, British government researchers asked Corning for help in creating glass fibers with attenuation below 20 dB/km, at a time (1966) when the best silica fiber suffered from signal loss of 1,000 dB/km. Drawing upon glass research from the 1930s to the 1950s, Keck and his Corning colleagues started tracking down and eliminating the sources of optical loss in fiber.

Their initial fiber-drawing equipment was crude--including a household vacuum cleaner--but effective. When Keck tested the first fiber with a loss of only 17 dB/km, he was so impressed that he wrote in his lab notebook, “Whoopee!” However, in 1970 an Applied Physics Letters reviewer initially rejected the Corning team’s paper because, Keck said, “it lacked believability.”

Today’s single-mode fibers fulfill Keck’s 1972 prediction of operation with losses of 0.2 dB/km or less at the 1,550-nm wavelength. Progress in telecommunications has come rapidly, especially after the 1984 court-ordered breakup of the old Bell-System AT&T, which created “a lot of fiber-hungry ‘baby Bells,’” Keck said. With the development of fiber that can bend around sharper corners without introducing losses, the industry is poised to use fiber in ways traditionally associated with copper wire.

OCT: Joining Optics and Clinical Science

OCT is a method of imaging using echoes of light--the optical analogue of ultrasound, said James Fujimoto of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (U.S.A.). In terms of resolution and tissue penetration, OCT bridges the gap between ultrasound and confocal microscopy.

Although Michel A. Duguay and A.T. Mattick first suggested the technique in a 1971 Applied Optics article, the first demonstration of OCT, performed on a cadaver eye, was published two decades later, according to Fujimoto. Since then, progress has come rapidly, with the technique’s extension to living tissue and the commercial development of OCT equipment for clinical use. Today, spectral domain interferometric techniques have improved both the speed and sensitivity of OCT. High-speed CCD cameras and volumetric data-rendering techniques have added to OCT’s ability to track dynamic processes such as capillary blood flow.

OCT is now moving beyond ophthalmic procedures into the world of intravascular imaging, where the technique can identify unstable arterial plaques and guide the medical treatment of those dangerous blood-flow blockers.

Fujimoto said that there has been a huge increase in intravascular OCT procedures in the last three years. The development of tiny fiber-optic catheters and the Fourier-domain mode-locked (FDML) laser have helped make this possible.

Finally, Fujimoto drew the audience’s attention to one of this CLEO’s postdeadline papers, which reports a record imaging speed for OCT using a swept single-mode vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL). OCT promises to be an exciting technological field to watch in the near future.

Applied optics, Biomedical optics, CLEO/QELS, Fiber optics, Lasers, Lasers, CLEO CLEO, CLEO2011, lasers, laser, fiber optics, biomedical optics, Donald Keck, James Fujimoto, optics, photonics, Optics & Photonics News, Patricia Daukantas, OPN

By Patricia Daukantas

CLEO:2011, the annual laser conference organized by OSA and other scientific societies, got off to a strong start today with a full range of sessions on pure laser physics and applications of the technology. Here are a few highlights from Monday‘s sessions:

• Could lasers make your automobile burn gasoline more efficiently than spark plugs do? Researchers from Japan and Romania have developed all-ceramic micro-lasers that could zap the insides of car-engine cylinders with multiple sub-nanosecond pulses to ignite a lean mixture of fuel and air. The speaker for the group, Takumori Taira of Japan’s Institute for Molecular Science, declined to predict when laser-powered cars will hit the market. The team’s research has been getting a lot of press, including a mention by a New York Times blogger.
• Although General Electric Corp. may be more famous for manufacturing light bulbs, appliances and jet engines, the company has made several important contributions to laser technology. In his talk on laser materials processing, Marshall G. Jones of GE Global Research (Niskayuna, N.Y., U.S.A.) recalled that Robert N. Hall of GE invented the semiconductor injection laser--forerunner of the innards of all laser printers and CD players--and Joseph P. Chernoch devised the face-pumped laser in 1972. Today, GE is more concerned with laser drilling, welding and cladding techniques for manufacturing components of locomotives and turbines. Its scientists are developing fiber lasers that meld the high stability of Nd:YAG lasers with the high efficiency and sharp focusing ability of CO₂ lasers.
• It’s taking awhile, but eventually the European Space Agency will launch Aeolus, a wind-lidar satellite containing the first ultraviolet laser to fly in space. Dutch physicist Martin Endemann explained that the transmitter assembly for the 355-nm laser must last for 5 billion shots over 39 months in orbit without significant degradation or coating damage. His team found that the system needed to contain low levels (0.2 mbar) of oxygen in order to keep the UV optical components from darkening. The laser should be ready to be installed in the satellite next year, pending a successful extended vacuum-chamber test this fall.

Tonight is the first of two plenary CLEO plenary sessions, this one featuring Donald Keck and James Fujimoto, both highlighted in OPN for May 2011, along with their fellow plenary speakers Moti Segev and Susumu Noda.

CLEO/QELS, Lasers, Lasers, CLEO CLEO:2011, Patricia Daukantas, lasers, electro-optics, Optics & Photonics News, The Optical Society, optics, photonics

By Patricia Daukantas

One of the highlights of the CLEO exhibit hall has been the extraordinary display of vintage lasers from all stages of the 50-year history of the technology. This exhibit has been on display earlier this year, but we still have been pleased to see it at CLEO 2010.

One of the biggest contributors to the laser-history exhibit was Robert Alan Hess, a holography consultant who is also a huge old-tech-gear buff. He told me that he acquired many of the vintage lasers through online auctions, company selloffs, and simple word-of-mouth. For a small bit of cash, more than one aging scientist in the process of home decluttering has been happy to part with an old instrument that’s been gathering dust for many years.

Of course, other people and organizations who have played important roles in laser history also lent their items to the exhibit. For example, here is a replica of Theodore Maiman’s first working ruby laser in front of his lab notebook from May 1960. Both items are on loan from his widow, Kathleen Maiman.

Here is one of the early commercial CO₂ lasers from Coherent Radiation Laboratories. Under the company’s logo, somebody once attached a red label: “Gift to Schawlow Lab.”

In honor of today’s 30^th birthday of the Pac-Man video game, here’s another blast from the past. On the top shelf of this display case are two laser pointers from the 1980s. They were considered “portable” because they were battery-powered and had a power switch on the side of the housing. Imagine wielding this during your next talk? These pointers must have had the heft and feel of “Star Wars” light sabers (or at least the things that the live actors used for their light-saber fights before the CGI people added in the “beams”).

Several times during CLEO Expo, Hess demonstrated a working flashlamp-pumped ruby laser that’s not much different from Maiman’s pioneering device. The ruby laser Hess was using is a commercial model that Hughes Research Laboratories—Maiman’s employer—put on the market in April 1962. Only about 100 of these lasers were manufactured and sold before technology raced ahead of the model.

Hess said his Hughes ruby laser was sold sometime in the early 1960s to Texas Instruments, which used it for sensor experiments, then declared it surplus around 1972. A man bought it and kept it, for whatever reason, until 2006, when he sold it to a laser show artist. That guy, in turn, soon put it up for auction on eBay and Hess got it.

In the photo below, Hess is using a modern He-Ne laser, hidden under the black cover, to align the optical path of the 1962 ruby laser. He will attempt to use the ruby laser pulse to punch a hole in a vintage razor blade that he found in his parents’ medicine cabinet.

Sure enough, the ruby laser punched a 120-m m-wide hole in the razor blade!

The vintage laser contained a pink ruby rod about 1.5 inches long and 3/8 inch wide, surrounded by the original helical xenon flashlamp and a diffuse white reflector. Hess isn’t sure how much life is left in the old flashlamp, but it worked every time during CLEO.

The laser history exhibit had a lot of other cool items: the first supermarket laser scanner, diode and DPSS lasers, and slabs of glass made especially for the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. I’m hoping that we at OPN will be able to put together an online gallery of all these photos I’ve taken during my week at CLEO.

I hope all our CLEO/QELS attendees have a safe journey home, and we’ll see you all next year in Baltimore, Maryland!

2010-05 May, CLEO/QELS, Lasers, Lasers, CLEO, Optics history lasers, cleo, cleo10, laser history, laserfest, 3d, cleo/qels, vintage lasers

By Patricia Daukantas

I thought I’d give my readers a quick summary of some of the interesting sessions I’ve been attending at CLEO/QELS and CLEO:Applications.

As you might expect, both terahertz technology and metamaterials are really hot topics right now. Put them together and you get a well-attended session on terahertz metamaterials. Hui Tao, Richard D. Averitt and colleagues at Boston University (U.S.A.) built structurally reconfigurable metamaterials using the techniques of micro-electro-mechanical-systems (MEMS) fabrication.

Basically, the BU team built an array of tiny split-ring resonators (SRRs), 72 x 72 m m in size, with an in-plane periodicity of 100 m m. These things are made of bianisotropic gold-silicon nitride and they tilt up and down like an array of little flaps, thus controlling the beam of terahertz radiation passing through the metamaterial. (Note: Tao recently finished his Ph.D. and is a postdoctoral fellow at Tufts University, also in Massachusetts, U.S.A.)

Also on the topic of metamaterials, a German group led by Benjamin Reinhard of the University of Kaiserslautern studied surface terahertz surface waves on an array of copper SRRs. Their experiment’s unit size was 41 x 41 m m, or about 1/7 of a wavelength at 1 THz, and every sixth row of the array was removed. They modeled the metamaterial as a thin-slab waveguide and found that their experimental (See the May 1 issue of Optics Letters -- vol. 35, p. 1320 -- for more details on their work.)

I always enjoy the Market Focus sessions (PhAST in past years, CLEO:Applications in 2010), and this year’s have been no exception.

At an energy-related session, Corey Dunsky, president of Aeos Consulting Inc. (U.S.A.), made some powerful arguments that lasers can help lower manufacturing costs and improve the conversion efficiency of photovoltaic panels. In one example he offered, single-step laser doping is well-positioned to be the best way of fabricating selective emitters on the surfaces of crystalline silicon solar panels. Andrew Masters, a vice president of Veeco Instruments (U.S.A.), described how his company’s atomic force microscopes can quantify solar cells’ efficiency to within plus-or-minus 0.5 percent.

Another session of Market Focus examined various optical methods for detecting chemical threats and explosives.

Price Kagey of Surface Optics Corp. (U.S.A.) reviewed a whole list of technologies -- laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, quantum-cascade-laser-based heating and thermography, broadband heating and emission spectroscopy, and hyperspectral imaging -- and found that all of them came up short in one way or another (cost, eye safety, ease of remote deployment, etc.).

Dan Strellis of Rapiscan Systems Ltd. (United Kingdom) said his company is working with both terahertz and X-ray technologies to develop a scanner specifically for shoes, so that airline passengers wouldn’t have to take off their shoes at security checkpoints. According to Adam Bingham of ICx Technologies (U.S.A.), workable systems for detecting explosives at checkpoints will probably require pairs of systems, one for wide-area scanning and a different kind of detector for zooming in to provide “high-confidence confirmation.”

Today (Thursday in California) is the final day that CLEO’s exhibit hall is open, so I’ll be making a final swing through there -- and getting one last glimpse of the laser history exhibit (more on that shortly). Tonight features the three concurrent CLEO/QELS postdeadline paper sessions.

One thing I’ve forgotten to mention in previous posts is a special LaserFest presentation: reprints of a collection of early quantum-electronics papers from the Soviet Union. It’s titled “Beginning of the Laser Era in the USSR,” and some of the articles have been translated into English for the first time. You can find it on the LaserFest website, Optics InfoBase or

this link.

2010-05 May, CLEO/QELS, Lasers, Lasers, CLEO cleo, lasers, cleo10, cleo/qels, laserfest, metamaterials, terahertz technology

By Patricia Daukantas

Most molecular biologists stare down at throngs of their tiny subjects the way an aerial photographer captures a large pack of runners at a marathon. Steven Block wants to focus on a single molecule, just like zooming in to study the guy who broke out of the pack to win the marathon four times.

That’s how Block, a professor of both biology and physics at Stanford University, set the stage for his Wednesday morning CLEO plenary talk on single-molecule biophysics with optical tweezers. I’m not an expert on biology by any stretch -- even my high-school biology class is sadly out of date now -- but I’ll try to convey what he said as best I can.

RNA polymerase, the enzyme that produces RNA, is a sophisticated nanomachine, and scientists would like to know how it works. Humans have three or four kinds of RNA polymerase; it’s the stuff that makes our cells differentiate themselves by function, even though each chromosome has the same DNA. On the scale of proteins, RNA polymerase is pretty big -- about 3,300 amino acids -- but on the scale of things in general, it’s pretty small -- roughly 10 nm big.

Optical tweezers are “the closest thing humans have made to a tractor beam,” Block said after showing his grad-school-days video of a single bacterium stuck in an optical trap. His experiments with then-grad-student Will Greenleaf and colleagues, as I understand them, involved setting up two tiny dielectric spheres in side-by-side traps and stretching a single DNA molecule back and forth between them. They did this in order to study riboswitches, which are non-coding messenger RNA (mRNA) strands that control gene expression by changing structure when they selectively bind to a molecule. More experiments are forthcoming, even though Greenleaf is now a postdoc at Harvard University.

David Awschalom, the QELS plenary speaker from the University of California at Santa Barbara, talked about something else that’s darned tiny: single electron spins in semiconductors.

Much like photons, electron spin ensembles exhibit coherence in doped semiconductors. Much research into semiconductor spins has been done with low-temperature ensembles, Awschalom said, but tremendous progress has been made over the last five years into the study of single spins in solid-state matter.

Diamond -- that glittering crystal of carbon -- is a CMOS-compatible (both p- and n-type) semiconductor with remarkable thermal properties. Awschalom and his colleagues study synthetic diamonds with certain impurities called nitrogen-vacancy centers, in which two neighboring points of the carbon crystal lattice are replaced by a nitrogen atom and a gap with no atom. (Diamond gemstones with many of these impurities look yellowish.)

Again, the way I understand these experiments, the team shone polarized light through a diamond at room temperature and used a confocal microscope to spatially map the photoluminescence pattern and thus measure the single spins. In a paper published last December in Science, the team described how these single spins can flip on the order of 1 ns, which is about five times faster than the RAM in a modern desktop computer operates. Paradoxically, performance improves with increasing temperature -- not the way conventional electronic devices work.

Arrays of these tiny spins within diamonds could have many uses in quantum computing and communications -- and many other kinds of defects in diamonds have yet to be explored. To keep up with Awschalom’s research group, check out http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/~awschalom.

2010-05 May, Biomedical optics, CLEO/QELS, Lasers, Lasers, CLEO cleo, cleo10, cleo/qels, laserfest, biomedical optics, molecular biology, dna, optical tweezers, optical manipulation, diamonds, semiconductors

By Patricia Daukantas

Light is a visual phenomenon, and the scientists and engineers who study it work long hours … but when it comes time for relaxation, some of them really rock out in a totally different medium: music.

Fortunately for us CLEO attendees, these singers and players showed off their gifts last night at a special LaserFest concert called “Lasers Rock!” We heard rappers and rockers, jazz and blues on the stage of the San Jose Civic Auditorium.

The idea for this concert came from CLEO co-chair Claire Gmachl of Princeton University, according to emcee Sir Peter Knight (OSA 2004 President). He said the acts reflect the Society’s diversity in age and musical taste.

First up were the young but professional duo Phat Photonics, who rapped about DNA, sang the blues about global warming, and performed a laser-rock song they wrote for the occasion.

Phat Photonics consists of Dan Gareau, of the Oregon Health and Sciences University, and Martin Zarzar, who also plays in a band called Pink Martini. When not rapping and rocking, Gareau studies confocal microscopy for non-invasive detection of melanoma. The duo will record their three tunes for their upcoming album, “Science Rock.”

Next came jazz guitarist Yoshiaki Nakajima, who, when not noodling on the strings searches for the perfect fiber frequency comb at Fukui University in Japan. I’m no musical expert, but I’d say his influences include Pat Metheny and the Dave Matthews Band, and his third piece was pure tone poetry.

According to Knight, Eric Hansotte plays in bars around Silicon Valley to support his day job in optical engineering. Wielding his acoustic guitar like a pro, Hansotte played several folk-rock songs, including a pean to women with brains (“I like a girl who will drool over Fleming’s left-hand rule….”).

It took a few minutes for the stage hands to set up for the next act, so I grabbed a beer at the bar in the lobby. I noticed the gallery of portraits of some mighty famous entertainers who have graced the stage of the Civic Auditorium: Dylan, Stones, Who, Santana, Sinatra. But our optical researchers didn’t appear intimidated by the challenge of following in their footsteps.

When I got back into the hall, Hansotte and OSA’s immediate Past President, Tom Baer, had joined the Free Lunch Band on stage for a jam. Then Hansotte and Baer left the stage and the band—which hails from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory—ripped through several covers of popular rock songs. I didn‘t catch their individual names, but they proved that a lab that can make really big lasers can also give off a really big wall of sound.

After that smokin’ hot set, Brian Kolner of the University of California at Davis cooled things down a few degrees with his brand of brilliant folk-rock on his 12-string acoustic guitar.

Finally, Bob Fisher and Steven Block took the stage for an excellent country-bluegrass set on various stringed instruments. Fisher is one of the program co-chairs of this year’s CLEO, and Block has to be back at the Civic Auditorium early this morning to deliver his CLEO plenary address, “Single-Molecule Biophysics with Optical Tweezers.”

To wrap up the night, Baer came back out on stage with his harmonicas—“First Harmonic” and “Second Harmonic”—and joined his colleagues for a sweet rendition of “Sweet Georgia Brown.” Sweet indeed!

2010-05 May, CLEO/QELS, Lasers, Lasers, CLEO cleo, cleo10, lasers, laserfest, lasersrock, cleo/qels, music, science rock

By Patricia Daukantas

Last night’s CLEO plenary session took the audience to places we’ve never been and things we’ve never imagined. How’s that for the power of lasers?

First, Gérard Mourou of the École Polytechnique in France, the pioneer of chirped pulse amplification, described the types of far-reaching fundamental physics that may be studied when the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI), an exawatt-class laser being designed by a consortium of 13 European nations.

“Lasers have revolutionized atomic physics, but we are still in the atomic regime,” Mourou said. The hugely energetic ELI pulses may push science into the realm of “photonuclear physics,” in which researchers could measure nuclear lifetimes, test electron dynamics at the attosecond scale, investigate ultrarelativistic laser-matter interactions and even break down the quantum vacuum and observe its components.

Mourou also paid tribute to Theodore “Ted” Maiman, who designed the first laser 50 years ago this week, and invited CLEO attendees to France’s own celebration of the laser’s historic anniversary next month (see the website in French and English).

Next, Douglas Simons, who grew from a butterfly-catching and backyard-stargazing kid to become director of the Gemini Observatory, reviewed the advances in laser-guide-star adaptive optics (AO) that have collapsed the point-spread function of astronomical objects from roughly an arcminute to a few milliarcseconds.

“Telescopes on the ground are becoming microscopes on the sky,” Simons said, noting that when he was a kid in the 1970s and 1980s, he never dreamed that he’d be head of an observatory that monitors the weather on Io and Titan, moons of Jupiter and Saturn respectively. Thanks to adaptive optics, astronomers have been able for the past decade to monitor the motions of stars swerving around the unseen black hole at the center of our galaxy.

Gemini’s next big project is developing a multi-conjugate adaptive optics (MCAO) system for its Gemini South telescope at Cerro Pachon, Chile. (In 2007 I visited its twin, Gemini North, on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.) The MCAO, dubbed Canopus, will use multiple laser guide stars simultaneously; these beams will be split off from a single 50-W solid-state sodium laser. Lockheed Martin and Coherent design the laser, which arrived in Chile just after the devastating 9.2-magnitude earthquake in February.

Simons compared Galileo’s first telescope-based hand drawing of our solar system family -- the rings of Saturn, the phases of Venus -- with the AO-facilitated photos of a planetary system around a star called HR 8799. He thanked the laser-science community for making the latter possible.

Incidentally, Konstantin Vodopyanov, one of the CLEO general co-chairs, gave us the stats for this year’s technical conference: out of 2,199 submitted papers, 1,085 oral presentations and 366 posters were accepted. We attendees are also being treated to something like 98 invited talks (some of which were submissions whose authors subsequently were asked to give longer presentations) and 33 tutorials.

Today (Tuesday) is going to be, in the words of CLEO blogger Jim van Howe, “a Mega-day or perhaps I should say Tera-day.” Our exhibit hall has opened, the Market Focus sessions are beginning, and tonight is the big “Lasers Rock” concert.

Lasers, CLEO, Lasers, CLEO/QELS lasers, cleo, cleo10, laser, lasers, physics, science, science history, astronomy