Skulls in the Stars

Well, I’m home!  A hectic final few days at the FiO conference combined with a lack of hotel internet access prevented me from checking the blog very often (I would wander around the Hyatt, where I wasn’t staying, looking for a place where I could get a signal — and the optimal location always changed).

I attended fewer talks on the last couple of days, in large part because I switched into planning collaborative research projects.  I attended a few special sessions, however: one on the 200 year anniversary of polarization, and one which encompassed the ‘best of topicals’.  I briefly summarize these below.

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All the ‘big ticket’ events took place on the first and second days, so by day 3 I settled into listening to some shorter talks on various subjects.  Also, day 3 is about the time I start trying to actually get some work done and start drifting away from sitting in sessions all day.  I did manage to sit in on a number of talks on plasmonics and metamaterials, and I briefly summarize some of the substance below.

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My hotel’s wireless internet completely crapped out late Sunday night, and they still have not been able to get it fixed.   Fortunately, there’s wireless connectivity in some of the conference center, so I thought I’d post an update while I’m thinking of it.  Being the first ‘real’ day of the conference, there were a lot of distinguished speakers.

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I thought I’d experiment and try liveblogging a session about What’s Hot in Optics Today? at the OSA Annual Meeting.  This was in fact one of the first sessions, and seemed interesting enough.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t liveblog, because I didn’t have wireless access in the chamber!  I wrote up my real-time comments in MS Word, and post them, slightly edited for clarity, below.

To summarize briefly: the division chairs (or their representatives) of the different technical groups of the meeting each gave a presentation concerning exciting research in their area.  The different talks were:

• Chris Schaffer, Frontiers in Biomedical Optics: Nanometer scale optical imaging inside cells.  Typically, one can only resolve (i.e. distinguish) features of an object which are separated by a size larger than half a wavelength.  Unfortunately, the internal structure of cells contains features which are much smaller than a wavelength.  The talk described very clever techniques for beating the diffraction limit.
• Daphne Bavelier, What’s Hot in Vision and Color: Pwning normal vision.  It turns out that playing fast-paced, first-person shooter video games is actually a benefit to vision!  This talk discussed research into the effects of video gaming on various aspects of vision.
• Juerg Leuthold, What’s Hot in Photonics and Opto-Electronics.  One of the current big challenges of fiber-optic communications is increasing the amount of data that can be transferred over a fiber-optic cable.  This talk discussed different techniques for improving this bit transfer rate, anticipating the next generation of internet connections.
• R. John Koshel, What’s Hot in Fabrication, Design and Instrumentation: The Optics in Energy and Imaging Systems.  Modern optical systems need to be efficient, both in collecting light (e.g. for use in solar cells) and in transmitting light (e.g. for making highly efficient light bulbs).  This talk discussed strategies for developing this next generation of optical technology.

The actual talks are supposed to be put online on this page for public consumption; in the meantime, you can read my ‘liveblogging’ below!

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