By Patricia Daukantas

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which has been raging since April 20 in the Gulf of Mexico, has the potential to pollute the region’s air as well as the water. Various optical technologies are tracking air quality in the region.

For example, one miniature fiber-optic spectrometer has been set up in southern Mississippi near the Gulf coast to measure levels of benzene, toluene, sulfur dioxide and other substances. Real-time data is being posted online at http://fenceline.org/test/map.php. According to this report, Argos Scientific custom-configured the monitoring station using the spectrometer from Ocean Optics. A second Argos system is going to the University of North Alabama for future studies of Gulf-area samples.

For a more complete picture of air quality around the Gulf Coast, see the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s page at http://www.epa.gov/bpspill/air.html, which provides some actual data files. You can also get real-time ozone and particulate-matter information from http://www.airnow.gov and http://gulfcoast.airnowtech.org. None of these sites, however, really get into details about the sensors and/or spectrometers that collected these data.

So far, the air out there doesn’t look too bad. Let’s hope it doesn’t get any worse.

By Patricia Daukantas

Instead of a long blog post, I’m going to post links to several optics-related news items that caught my eye this week.

• A German photonics scientist, Michael Grätzel, has won the Millennium Prize of the Technology Academy Finland for his role in developing dye-sensitized solar cells that mimic photosynthesis. Grätzel heads the Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. A Web graphic illustrates the principle behind these so-called Grätzel cells, which have been recently commercialized.

• NIST Tech Beat, a website of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, writes about a recent Optics Express article describing a “dark-pulse” laser. It’s a semiconductor infrared laser that makes dips in light intensity, instead of bursts of light. The scientists at NIST and JILA in Boulder, Colo. (U.S.A.) say that the technology may be useful in signal processing and optical networking.

• A multinational team has used pump-probe spectroscopy to measure electron localization in H₂ and D₂ molecules on the attosecond scale. Of course, this work would not be possible without the development of attosecond lasers. G. Sansone et al. report on this work in the June 10 issue of Nature.

• Finally, Light Reading reports on the impact World Cup fever is going to have on worldwide network traffic. And you thought you were the only one waiting for that “buffering” message to go away so that you can watch your favorite team online….

By Patricia Daukantas

Two telescope-building astronomers who have won OSA awards for optical engineering are among this year’s winners of the Kavli Prize for Astrophysics.

The Kavli Prizes, worth $1 million each, are bestowed every two years in the fields of astrophysics, neuroscience and nanoscience – areas that didn’t really exist when the Nobel Prizes were founded.

Jerry Nelson, J. Roger P. Angel and Raymond N. Wilson shared the astrophysics prize for their contributions to the technology behind some of the world’s largest telescopes.

Nelson, of the Center for Adaptive Optics at the University of California at Santa Cruz (U.S.A.), served as project scientist for the twin 10-m-aperture Keck Telescopes on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea. These telescopes use his design of lightweight hexagonal mirror segments with active controls to keep the optics perfectly aligned. His pioneering design is being used in other large telescopes now under construction. An OSA member, Nelson received the 1996 Joseph Fraunhofer Award/Robert M. Burley Prize from OSA for his contributions to optical engineering.

Angel, director of the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab at the University of Arizona, took a different approach to the design of large, lightweight telescope mirrors: casting them as a single unit in a giant spinning furnace that cools slowly. The resulting mirrors have a near-parabolic top surface and a honeycomb structure underneath. He received OSA’s Fraunhofer Award/Burley Prize in 2007 for his body of work, which includes fiber-fed spectroscopy and solar photovoltaic technology.

The third winner of the astrophysics Kavli Prize, Raymond N. Wilson, formerly of the European Southern Observatory in Germany and Imperial College London in England, developed the computer-controlled actuation system for active optics, which is used in many of the world’s largest observatories.

Five scientists from U.S. universities and industrial research centers shared the Kavli Prizes in nanoscience and neuroscience. The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters made the prize announcement this morning. Funding for the prizes comes from comes from the Kavli Foundation.