Tucson, Arizona is home to millions of cacti, thousands of quail, stunning sunsets, amazing mountains and excellent optics research and industry. The Optical Society of America and the American Physical Society's Division of Laser Science held their annual meeting at Tucson's Hilton El Conquistador in mid-October 2005.
The Undergraduate Research Symposium, organized by Hal Metcalf of Stony Brook, was held on Monday afternoon. A record number of participants gave talks and posters for over six hours. My talk went well, and was much improved from the talk I gave earlier that month. Four Nobel Laureates, the students' mentors, and passersby heard some of the talks and/or looked at the posters. Questions were asked of speakers both by their peers and by experts in their fields they had never met. Students with similar projects discussed ideas over lunch, just like the rest of the physicists at the conference.
The Plenary session consisted of a variety of talks and awards presented to OSA and DLS members. The three 2005 Nobel Laureates - Roy J. Glauber, John L. Hall and Theodor W. Haensch - discussed their careers, physics, and the mixed joys of winning the Prize. A near-universal sentiment among recipients in the United States is the annoyance of being called at 3 am by Sweden. Haensch also gave a great talk about the frequency comb.
A number of students who spent the summer in Europe doing research through the University of Central Florida College of Optics & Photonics international NSF-REU program were reunited at the meeting. The students worked in various labs in France and Germany, and they all found enough time to explore some of Europe. Four of these students had direct ties to Stony Brook University.
On Tuesday evening there was a tour of various labs at the University of Arizona�s College of Optical Sciences.
The Laboratory for Diffractive and Micro-Optics has an amazingly fast method for creating computer-generated holograms (CGHs). A glass plate spin-coated in resist is written by a laser. The laser's intensity is controlled with an AOM, and the amount of phase shift the resist creates depends on the laser�s writing power at each point. The laser is translated with high precision according to the Fourier transform of the desired image. The writing process takes about 20 seconds! The resist is chemically dissolved and the CGH is ready for use.
Poul Jessen has a two laser cooling labs that are doing quantum optics. One lab has an optical lattice setup to study tunneling of Cs through neighboring wells in the lattice. The other is doing spin squeezing. This requires a glass (non-metallic) chamber that is quite beautiful.
Brian Anderson's BEC lab was exciting, especially since they achieved BEC only three weeks ago! They have two chambers, horizontally separated by about a half-meter tube. "A couble billion atoms" are cooled in the first glass chamber, thanks to a relatively super-powerful laser. The cute little Rb cloud is transferred magnetically to the smaller final chamber. That chamber has even less optical access than Rochester's! Their plans for the newborn BEC include making a gyroscope, using two rings of light, one containing BEC and one not.
The four sessions of Optical Vortices took place on Wednesday afternoon and all day Thursday. A few vortex-related papers were also included in the general poster session. Grover Swartzlander Jr. organized the sessions, and gave an excellent talk . David Palacios spoke about the vortex coronograph. Mark Dennis discussed the polarization singularities in the sky, which is a result of his collaboration with Michael Berry.
A graduate student of the University of Regensburg's Institute for Experimental and Applied Physics presented research (which was quite heavy on topology) that was done using a "modified optical beamer." We asked him what a beamer is, and were excited to learn that it is what we in the States call a projector. The group modified a malfunctioning projector and is now using it as an inexpensive spatial light modulator! I am now working to do the same at Stony Brook.
The exhibit is a chance for manufacturers, schools, publishers, organizations and more to showcase themselves to the optics community. There was a booth from Optimax Systems, a lens manufactuer one town away from my home in upstate New York. We talked to the Hamamatsu representative, hoping there would be a cheaper spatial light modulator model this year. We learned about the educational grants for perchasing a spectrometer from Ocean Optics. I got a few free t-shirts and pens to enhance my geekiness. We saw demonstrations of instructional labs by TeachSpin, and learned the interesting story of the family company. We browsed math and physics books, and purchased one on mathematical methods for physics.
We attended a number of holography talks (although I had to leave during many of them because I was coughing so incredibly much).
A physicist presented research he'd done on volume holograms that store multiple images. Different images are written at different incident angles; when the angle of the read beam is changed, the resulting holographic image changes. This could be used to make one hologram that would create optical vortices of various topological orders!!
We spoke to many people about the methods they'd used for creating bleached holograms. Strangely, it is quite difficult to find good film for holography nowadays. Even Kodak has stopped making much of its film thanks to the digital photography era. We all traded information about film vendors.
We heard a talk about heart attacks caused by vortices in electrical signals in heart muscle.
Conferences are like family reunions, only infinitely more exciting because people become interrelated in more complex ways each year.
At the exhibit we spoke to a man from Thorlabs (one of the primary sources for optics and lab equipment). He knew Marty Cohen, a physicist retired from Quantronix Lasers who has recently been mentoring students in the Laser Teaching Center. He and Marty spent time at Bell Labs together. Later I learned from Nick Bigelow the story of Thorlabs's founding: a mistreated physicist at Bell Labs left the company and started Thorlabs with the experience of an experimentalist. Nick, whose lab I worked in over the summer, knows Marty, and the man from Thorlabs, and Anthony Johnson (who visited Stony Brook in September, and is from the University of Maryland - Baltimore County, which is the same place a fellow REU student, Lidiya, is from), and...
This was my first time in Arizona or any cactus-heavy environment. Exciting things that are less physics-related include stunning sunsets, a dust devil, tumbleweeds, 75 MPH speed limit, Cup Cafe, lizards, dry riverbeds, open cattle ranges, Waffle House, border patrol cars, hummingbirds, two coyotes, bats, a swarm of bees, Casbah Tea House, birds living in cacti, excellent Mexican (and Thai) food, incredible mountains surrounding the otherwise flat valley, quail and a bobcat!
Thanks to everyone who made this wonderful experience possible for me: Hal Metcalf, Nick Bigelow, John Noé, APS-DLS, WISE-Citibank Travel Award and OSA.
The next OSA meeting will be in Rochester, New York, a few blocks
from where I was born. :)