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