By Patricia Daukantas
Greetings from San Diego! For the first time since 1999, the Optical Fiber Communication Conference is taking place in this sunny Southern California city. It's my first-ever visit to San Diego, so I'm doubly excited to be here.
If I had to summarize this year's OFC theme in as few words as possible, it would be "big pipes." Everyone is talking about the latest high-bandwidth communications technologies that the worldwide growth of the Internet is demanding. People are also realizing that it's important to consider not just the size of the datastream—Gigabit Ethernet, 100-Gigabit Ethernet, Terabit Ethernet, whatever—but also the proper management of it.
For example, yesterday afternoon's Future Internet Symposium sought to give the fiber-optics folks who attend OFC/NFOEC the perspective of experts in computer network architecture and computer security. Guru Parulkar of Stanford University's Clean Slate Program said that the present-day Internet is not designed to take full advantage of the dynamic optical network technology that researchers who attend OFC are developing. Adel Saleh of the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, the organization that gave us the predecessor to the global Internet, said that DARPA is starting a 42-month study of ways to eliminate those bottlenecks. Computer-security expert Stefan Savage of the University of California at San Diego painted a bleak picture of the growth of money-making threats to network users and applications.
Headlining today's Service Provider Summit was Reed Hundt, who chaired the Federal Communications Commission in the mid-1990s. Despite the grim title of his talk—"The Coming Global Triumph of Communications and the Threat to American Standards of Living"—Hundt was surprisingly upbeat. The keys to America's success in growing IT and communications companies, he said, have been our stable legal environment, open networking technology and culture of entrepreneurial leadership. He would like to see the dynamism of the communications industry weave itself into the U.S. energy and health care sectors, which are low in venture capital and IT respectively. (Fascinating fact: Data centers consume 2 percent of all the electricity generated in the United States.)
OFC/NFOEC 2008 will wrap up on Thursday evening with the postdeadline paper sessions, which traditionally feature a number of results of "hero experiments" in fiber-optic technology. This year, 35 of 114 submissions were accepted, and I'm looking forward to attending the sessions.
By Patricia Daukantas
Despite all the history-making world and national news going on, optics made the front page of this morning’s Washington Post. An article by staff writer Rick Weiss highlights both the black-material research going on at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and the “invisibility-cloak” metamaterials studies by several other teams of scientists.
Shawn-Yu Lin, a physics professor at RPI, and his colleagues recently created a thin material that absorbs more than 99.9 percent of incident light. Their research was published last month in the journal Nano Letters.
The RPI technique is different from the femtosecond-laser-ablation technique developed by Chunlei Guo and Anatoliy Vorobyev at the University of Rochester (see last week's blog post). Lin’s team used low-density arrays of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes to create the light-absorbing material.
I was amused to read Weiss’s metaphorical description of the blackest-black material as “a roach motel for photons—light checks in, but it never checks out.” The Post article goes on to describe recent research in the invisibility properties of metamaterials and quotes both OSA Fellow Vladimir Shalaev and 2007 CLEO/QELS plenary speaker Sir John Pendry.
By Patricia Daukantas
Metals are going multicolored, thanks to the femtosecond-laser-ablation technique developed by Chunlei Guo at the University of Rochester. Without paint, aluminum and platinum can look just like gold—or like a blue sky.
Guo, an assistant professor of optics, and postdoctoral fellow Anatoliy Vorobyev have been studying the roughness of metallic surfaces at the nanoscale level. Their research on precision control of the surface structures at the nanometer scale led to the new colorizing technique.
The February 2007 issue of OPN described the previous work of Guo and Vorobyev in blackening gold surfaces. However, the multicolor technique is a significant advance over the research that preceded it.
The Rochester team’s original “black metal” surfaces absorbed all wavelengths of light. However, “the key to the coloring technique is that we now can control the spectral responsivity of metals,” Guo said.
In other words, the researchers change the size of the tiny, polarization-dependent structures etched onto the metallic surfaces in order to change the surface colors.
“The most significant step forward is that we now have a precise control in the range of nanostructure sizes formed, and these nanostructures can affect the light response of the metal surface and give us the appearance of a color or range of colors,” Guo said.
The researchers control the size of the region that gets colored by varying the width of the focused laser beam, which is typically 100 microns to 1 mm wide. A narrowly focused beam produces a tinier area of color change, opening the potential for using the technique to etch multicolored patterns on metallic surfaces.
Guo and Vorobyev have produced solid gold, blue and gray colors on the surfaces of aluminum, platinum, titanium, tungsten and silver. In addition, the researchers have produced iridescent surfaces, which make a metal appear variously colored at different viewing angles.
The research was recently published in Applied Physics Letters and also garnered attention with an article in the New York Times.
By Patricia Daukantas
My first camera was a Polaroid—back when the “colorpack” film had the peel-off chemical paper. I think it was a Model 320; it had bellows. The camera was the best Christmas present I got when I was 12 years old, and I immediately started taking pictures of my parents and grandmother. Letting the print-negative sandwich dangle from my fingers for exactly 60 seconds, then peeling the thing apart and setting the print to dry without getting chemicals on my skin, became a test of my ability to handle grown-up technology.
Of course, a year or two later, Polaroid Corp. came out with the first SX-70, and people didn’t have to fiddle with timers and smelly trash anymore. But those cameras were expensive, so I labored with my older Polaroid for a few more years until I got a hand-me-down Kodak camera from my father. Finally, I took up 35-mm photography in college.
Now comes word that Polaroid—or what’s left of the company after a bankruptcy several years ago—is discontinuing its remaining instant-film products. The company is willing to license its technology to other companies who might want to supply the ever-shrinking niche market for the instant-developing film. However, if no firms come forward, the remaining Polaroid devotees will be out of luck.
As the New York Times recounts, the self-developing Polaroid prints seemed like a wonder back in the days of film photography. And instant photography has a major connection to OSA history: As noted in the February 2007 issue of OPN, Polaroid founder Edwin H. Land chose the 1947 OSA annual meeting to demonstrate the technology for the first time. He was the hit of the OSA banquet, which took place the same month that his JOSA article was published explaining the process.
Legend has it that Land was inspired to develop instant photography when his daughter asked him why she couldn’t see the pictures he took immediately. Today’s children, surrounded by digital cameras, will never think to ask that question.
Polaroid Land Camera 360
By Patricia Daukantas
The popular rock band U2 made its first concert movie two decades ago. So why are film critics falling all over themselves to rave about its second movie?
The answer, it turns out, lies in optical imaging technology. The directors of “U2 3D,” which opened recently in limited engagement, used special 3D digital cameras from 3ality Digital Inc. of Burbank, Calif., to film the live-action concerts.
As reported by Wired.com, each of the 3ality mobile camera setups—there were nine in all—incorporated two Sony digital cameras, surround-sound recording equipment, and an unprecedented degree of computer control of the cameras and zoom lenses. The cameras generated incredible amounts of data, which fiber-optic cables fed into 3ality’s servers for editing and post-production. (The finished film contains almost 1 petabyte of data—that’s as much as 1 million 1-GB USB drives.)
More information is available on the movie's Web site—but check your computer’s speakers before surfing there, as the home page features Bono’s voice singing the opening of the song “Vertigo.”