Today there were not as many people around, but the quality of talks didn’t correlate with the number of people. Before I even had my morning coffee, I had already learned some things that surprised me.
Prof. Afshar showed that in sub-wavelength optical fibers, nonlinear effects are stronger than you think, and then he went on to demonstrate a neat effect of nearly binary polarization flipping in fibers, all by using a fully vectorial model for propagation.
Next I saw a nice presentation by Asma Al-Qasimi on cross-polarization, an extension of the work that Prof. Wolf discussed yesterday (in his 53rd year speaking at the OSA meeting!). She showed how cross-polarization can affect your measurements if you don’t account for it! Surely, this effect is fairly small in my laser-illuminated system, but nevertheless, it was enough to convince me to go back to the lab and add an extra polarizer to my setup to avoid this issue.
After the first coffee break, I saw two great invited talks, one showing beautiful results using phase imaging techniques to solve important problems in biology, by Prof. Gabriel Popescu. He was a postdoc at MIT when I first started, and I remember him patiently answering my stupid questions about interferometery when I was just an annoying first year (now I’m an annoying postoc with just as many, but different, questions). The other was by Prof. Soljacic, showing how to build photonic crystals with an angular (rather than frequency) bandwidth, and how to make one-way waveguides! I didn’t understand all the physics behind this, but watching a pulse travel along the edge of a photonic crystal, hit a wall, then proceed to snake around the wall and keep going in the same direction (instead of reflect/scatter off it), was pretty amazing!
Well, FiO is over for another year. It’s been fun. I hope to be back next year for my 4th annual talk at this conference, baby steps towards my effort to catch up to Prof. Wolf’s impressive record!
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