Thursday, August 18, 2011

Be well, do good work and keep in touch

I can't believe I am writing this until almost one month later. But here it is.

I had a great time in Kauai. The meeting was super exciting. The scenary could not be better.

I want to thank April Zack for her coordinating of the blogging and her behind-scene editing of all the posts.

With my supervisor Alexei Sokolov's support I could not do any of this.

My husband helped me with kids as with all the other conferences. I appreciate his constant support.

I don't think I will do blogging anymore. It is simply impossible to combine it with attending talks, giving a talk and with a family around you. Last year at UP I was only presenting a poster so I had more time posting. I apologize for the short and delayed blogs I wrote this year. It was constantly on my mind though. I take it seriously.

Overall it was a lot of fun.

I will borrow Garrison Keillor's sign-off from his Writer's Almanac as a way of bidding farewell for a while: Be well, do good work and keep in touch.

What is the highest harmonics number ever created up to date?

Sorry for the belated post but I felt the urge of writing about the wonderful talk On Thursday the planary session by professor Margaret Murnane:

NLO from 2 w to 5100 w in 50 years.

(It was original titled "Nonlinear Optics at the Timescale of the Electron – Bright
Coherent Attosecond-to-Zeptosecond KeV X-Rays". I like the new title much more.)

I alway enjoyed her talks. I noticed during her talk she used the word "beautiful" many times, which showed her strong passion toward her work.

Indeed, this year they sucessfully generated 6-cycle FWHM, 3.9 micro meter 20-Hz, multi-mJ pulses from a novel optical parametric chipred pulse amplifcation architecture, which has the higest pulse energy from a femtosecond mid-IR source to date. (Optics letters Vol. 36 page 2755 2011, published a few weeks before the NLO meeting).

With this laser, full phase matching of HHG in the KeV region of th spectrum (up to the 5031th order) is possible. (CLEO 2011 postdeadline and 2011 NLO papers).

She mentioned that 5th and 7th HHG was discovered by accident in 1987. I wonder what those people would think of her achievement of producing several thousands of harmonics today?

The broadest coherent supercontinuum they generated support transform limited 2.5 attoseocnd pulse duration, scalable to zeptosecond time scales (1 zs=10 to the minus 21 s).

Below is a picture of the laser-like x-ray beam which I found from the 2011 CLEO postdeadine paper:



By the end, she mentioned the exciting application of the X-ray as the ideal probes of the nanoworld. It can also be used for coherent lensless imaging.



Friday, July 29, 2011

Luau (many more fun pictures)


My husband bought everyone in our family Hawaii style clothes















Professor Wayne H. Knox and his wife performing on stage






Program chair Steve Cundiff with his family.





Professor Harris



Pretty girl





General Chair Daniel Gauthier and his wife





















Luau workshop students performing on stage.






Engaging conversation










Call for voluteers




Professor Boyd walking to stage...










sidestage with beautiful girls
















General chair Takunori Taira with his wife









Professor Andy Kung with the famous couple. You know who they are, right?




Professor Takayoshi Kobayashi with the famous couple, again.























concluding remarks by Steve Cundiff and his sleepy daughter

Thursday, July 28, 2011

poster session (many pictures)

Entrance of the poster session room...

This meeting had 149 presentations including 3 plenary, 30 invited, 92 oral, and 24 poster presenations. There were many interesting results presented there. One thing I like about the poster session is the valuble face to face communication with the presenter. You can get all your questions answered.














Saturday, July 23, 2011

50 years of NLO---talk by Robert Byer



Prof. Byer talked about his passion for both light waves and ocean waves:



He mentioned a story when he worked with Prof. Harris:



He dropped the crystal yet this leads to Stanford's crystal growing by themselves and a life long collaboration. So bad things can turn to be good afterall.

Prof. Byer's slide is available on 2011 NLO website.

Thanks Andy Kung for providing me the pitures.

The Birth of Nonlinear Optics---talk by professor Nicolaas Bloembergen



Although Professor Bloembergen used the old-fashioned projector, he delivered a wonderful talk on the early history of the nonlinear optics.

He started by saying that Ruby laser is nonlinear optics. Therefore, we should celebrate the birth of nonlinear optics 1 year earlier, together with the laserfest.


Applause continued for a long time after his talk.





Thanks to Andy Kung for providing me these pictures.