Tuesday

Today, I tried to learn all or nothing about quantum computing, and listened to a great talk about using nonlinearity in quantum computing, by Prof. White of Uni Queensland, Australia, where he went over the ideas central to this 'hot topic'. One thing I learned is that one photon can be used to flip the polarization of another photon. Cool!
 Prof. Psaltis of EPFL (who is my grand-advisor) showed some really cool things that can be done with soft lithography to make 'opto-fluidics'. My favourite was a variable iris that was controlled by the interplay of two fluids in a cavity, one clear and one opaque.
And to end the day, I stood at the back of a packed room for Prof. Wax's tutorial on digital holography, coherence imaging, and biological applications. This talk was presented in a very clear and accessible way - a great tutorial!
Here's a pic of some nerds who are super-excited to go to a Laserfest event (my former labmates):

Tomorrow, I will be attending the session on Unconventional Polarization as well as how to use it for good, and of course, the wavefront sensing section!