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 C. David Chaffee, Chaffee Fiber Optics

“We are on the way to the gigabit society,” said OFC/NFOEC 2011 keynote speaker Bruno Orth Tuesday morning at the plenary session. Orth defines the gigabit society as a mobile broadband photonic network that is all IP. “The price for WDM has gone down tremendously over the past decade,” said Orth. Router performance is much better than Moore's law would estimate.

New networking models are needed to deal with the economics of fiber to the home, Orth said. “The first 20 percent of those receiving it are not the problem,” he observed. “The last 20 percent account for up to 50 percent of the networking cost. Therefore, we need a new model for FTTH infrastructure”

A helpful exercise for service providers that is used at Deutsche Telekom is to assume that all your customers use smart phones, or that all your customers had their full content in the cloud, or that they all used VOIP and roamed freely, according to Orth. He raised the growing fear that many have that smart phones have the potential to stress or even crash the network.

“We are engaged in optics in a way we have never been before,” said Alan Gara, IBM Fellow and Blue Gene Chief Architect. “All interconnects in the new IBM supercomputers will be optical by 2018,” according to Gara. “Without optics we will not be able to continue to build systems,” he continued. “The optical boundary will continue to move in.” The only way IBM will be able to achieve its next gen supercomputing goals will be through optics, he said.

Kristin Rinne of AT&Labs said there has been an 8,000 percent increase in mobile broadband traffic over the last four years, noting that the application behind much of the growth is video. “There is an awfully lot of wireline in the wireless network,” said Rinne, who quoted Dell'Oro report numbers which say that $8 billion will be spent on fiber and microwave mobile backhaul upgrades in the next five years.

Congratulations to the following winners acknowledged at the plenary session: Constance Chang-Hasnain (David Sarnoff award),  David Welch (Tyndall Award), the following OSA fellows: Young-Kai Chen (Bell Labs), Charles Cox (Photonic Systems), Michael Eiselt (ADVA Optical), Nicholas Frigo (U.S. Naval Academy), Jonathan Knight ( University of Bath), Ashok Krishmamoorthy (Oracle Labs), Xiang Liu (Bell Labs), William Shieh (University of Melbourne), and Lakshmin Tamil (University of Texas).  IEEE Communications Society fellows include: Debabani Choudhury (Intel), Paul Morton (Morton Photonics), Jawadand Salehi (Sharif University of Technology) and Jane Simmons (Monarch Network Architects). IEEE Photonic Society fellows include Douglas Baney (Agilent Technologies), Jin-Xing Cai (Tyco), Nareseh Chand (BAE Systems), Frederick Kish (Infinera), Paul Morton (Morton Photonics, again), Rodney Waterhouse (Pharad), and Alice White (Alcatel-Lucent).

C. David Chaffee (cdcfiber@aol.com) owns Chaffee Fiber Optics, a Baltimore-based firm that specializes in analyzing developments in fiber optics and publishing on the state of the industry.

OFC/NFOEC, OSA David Chaffee, OFC/NFOEC, fiber optics, optical communications, Moore's law, IBM, OSA, The Optical Society, Optics & Photonics News

By C. David Chaffee, Chaffee Fiber Optics

The first keynote speaker at OSA's Executive Forum 2011, Basil Alwan, set an optimistic tone for both the Forum and OFC/NFOEC 2011, observing that the optical transport industry now is “really breathtaking.” He even went so far as to say “it is an honor to be associated with this industry at this time.”  Alwan is president of the IP Division and Head of Portfolio Strategy for the Networks Groups.

What's so exciting? Well, for one thing the size of the network continues to grow as does the number of its endpoints, Alwan told a crowded Marriott conference room Monday morning. Caching also is a high growth storage application Alwan is excited about. “We are thrilled with the progress in 100 G,” he continued, “we are really pulling the rabbit out of the hat with 100 G.”

Alwan went on to say that 400 G is “achievable and practical,” and that a terabit “will be necessary.”

Perhaps giving insights into what Alcatel-Lucent's optical research involvement will be going forward, Alwan said “it is not an option to leave anything on the table any more. We can't ignore any options. Each one may be a silver bullet.”

In the first panel following Alwan's talk, Verizon's Glenn Wellbrock agreed with Alwan's assessment of the coming need for 100 G. The popular Wellbrock, who is speaking on some six panels this week, said optical transport routes between New York and Chicago, “deserve 100 G, probably several 100 G lines.”

A question that dominated the panel was how rapidly the network operator should move to IP optical using packet transport. While Google was seen as having the newer, next gen network, Wellbrock observed that any Google search or phone call is going through a Verizon or AT&T network at some point.

And Google Senior Network Architect Bikash Koley, also a member of the first panel, was deferential, observing that, “I think everyone would agree that we are moving to packet-based services.”

However, Koley also noted that “the biggest challenge for us is that a lot of the optical transport equipment that has been designed we don't need.” He acknowledged that “the way to overcome this” is for manufacturers to know what Google needs.

When we caught up with him afterwards, Koley said his comments related to the larger Google core optical transport network, not the 1 Gbps to the residence network the company has promised to bring to one or more communities. However, he did say Google was 'surprised” by the high number of vendors that responded to the 1 Gbps to the home solicitation once it was offered.

C. David Chaffee (cdcfiber@aol.com) owns Chaffee Fiber Optics, a Baltimore-based firm that specializes in analyzing developments in fiber optics and publishing on the state of the industry.  

Ophthalmology, OSA C. David Chaffee, OFC/NFOEC, OSA, The Optical Society, optical transport, fiber optics, optical communications, Executive Forum

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

OSA Honorary Member Steven Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, is President-elect Barack Obama’s choice to lead the U.S. Department of Energy.

Democratic officials announced Obama’s environmental team to the media last night, according to the Washington Post, the New York Times and CNN.

Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William D. Phillips shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics for their work in laser cooling and trapping atoms. OSA named Chu a Fellow in 1991 and an Honorary Member in 2003. In 1994, he received OSA’s William F. Meggers Award for outstanding work in spectroscopy.

At Frontiers in Optics 2006, OSA’s 90^th annual meeting, Chu gave a plenary talk devoted to energy efficiency and the search for alternative fuels, including solar energy.

2008-12 December, Energy, OSA steven chu, fio, osa, energy, energy policy

By Patricia Daukantas

One uses optics to probe the molecular mechanisms of living cells. A second performs femtosecond time-resolved coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS) measurements on single molecules. A third did a college-freshman project involving a vertical cavity surface-emitting laser.

These three up-and-coming scientists are all doctoral candidates in science and engineering and are all active in OSA and its student chapters. They’re also all women who recently told their stories to Jennifer Kruschwitz, a long-time OSA volunteer, as part of a campaign to increase the visibility of minorities and women, who are underrepresented in optics and photonics careers (as well as most other branches of science and engineering).

The first three women to get the Minorities and Women in OSA (MWOSA) spotlight are Ruby Raheem, Centre for Biomedical Engineering, University of Edinburgh, U.K.; Meredith Lee, department of electrical engineering, Stanford University, U.S.A.; and Desiré Whitmore, department of chemical and material physics, University of California, Irvine, U.S.A. All three scientists’ profiles are available at OSA’s Web site and more inspiring stories like theirs will appear in future months. Be sure to sign up for the monthly MWOSA newsletter if you haven’t already done so.

In other news, the journal Nature recently published an article claiming sexism within the particle physics community at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., U.S.A. (Note that you will need to pay to read the full article unless you have a subscription to the journal.) The author, Sherry Towers, studied the careers of 57 researchers on one particle physics experiment and found that the women on the team did more of the maintenance work and got less of the glory (in the form of conference talks). The online version of the full Nature article includes a lively stream of comments on Towers’ findings and other issues concerning women in scientific careers; you can view the comments on the Web without purchasing the full news story. A preprint of the original article by Towers is at arXiv.org.

2008-04 April, OSA osa, scientists, students, women, careers, mwosa

Posted by Christina Folz, OPN Managing Editor

And now for more optics limericks taken from the Winter 1977 Optics News (the precursor to OPN).  In case you missed the first bunch, check out my earlier post and get inspired! OPN is now accepting submissions for a new limerick contest.  Send your submissions to opn@osa.org or post them  directly into the “comments” section of this blog. (Note about the second and third limericks: Peter Franken was the OSA president at the time of the contest, so that is why the poets chose to skewer him in their verses.)  

Experimental Technique
There is no faint penumbra of doubt
In the lab one should not be without
A light optical hammer
To give things a slam, or
That final adjustment—a clout.

—R.I. MacDonald
Ottawa, Canada

The election of Peter A. Franken
Was a shock, and the news slowly sank in.
He achieved this great fame
When he wrote down his name
On the ballot when filling the blank in.

—S. Bashkin
Tucson, Ariz.

There was a bright fellow named Planck,
Whose thoughts were exceedingly franck.
He showed us his verve
With the black-body curve,
Planck, for your constant, we thanck.

—J.E. Dennis
Rockville, Md.

An optical physicist, Franken
A gigawatt laser did sanction
To bake breakfast toast
Using third-order ghosts
At nine hundred one degrees Ranken.

—F.M. Phelps
Mt. Pleasant, Mich.

2007-11 November, Miscellaneous Optics, OSA osa, humor, scientists

Posted by Christina Folz, OPN Managing Editor

Right next to my desk stands a 5-foot-tall file cabinet that contains every issue ever published of Optics & Photonics News and its precursor Optics News. With 32 years of history at my fingertips, I often can’t resist the temptation to peruse the archives in my spare moments.

A few weeks ago, I came across the results of an optics limerick contest that ran in the magazine back in 1977. I was so delighted by the winning limericks that I thought I’d share them with OPN’s current readers. I intend to organize a similar contest for an upcoming issue. So feel free to send your own compositions to me at opn@osa.org, or post them on this blog. I’ll be collecting them over the next several months to publish in an early 2008 edition. Enjoy! (Note about the first-prize limerick: Peter Franken was the OSA president at the time of the contest, so that is why the poet chose to skewer him in his verse.)

FIRST PRIZE

“With impotence I had been troubled,”

An optician confessed, and then bubbled:

“An’ sure and I’m thankin’

That man Peter Franken

For having my frequency doubled!”

—J.D. Macomber, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

SECOND PRIZE

Though a Michelson Interferometer,

Equipped with a Golay bolometer,

Could measure the heat

In grilled hamburger meat,

It will never replace the thermometer.

—F.F. Hall, Boulder, Colo.

THIRD PRIZE

Optical Frustration

In science, I said almost gaily,

New discoveries are made nearly daily;

But in optics it’s true

There is nothing new,

‘Twas all done before by Lord Rayleigh.

—P. Nisenson, Lexington, Mass.

HONORABLE MENTION

On Interference

Sir Isaac was one of those kings

Of optics and other bright things;

But when he took a shower,

He’d scrub for an hour

On his tub to avoid Newton’s Rings.

—D.A. Richards, Rochester, N.Y.

There were four more honorable mention limericks published in the Winter 1977 Optics News—but I’ll save those for another day!

2007-10 October, Miscellaneous Optics, OSA osa, humor, scientists

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