FiO 2011 not-to-be-missed highlights

Gail Overton   Senior Editor   Laser Focus World   gailo@pennwell.com

If you're able to attend the 2011 Frontiers in Optics conference (FiO 2011; www.frontiersinoptics.com)--the OSA's 95th Annual Meeting that also includes the Laser Science XXVII conference--there are several special events and significant research papers that should not be missed. To be held next week from October 16-20 in San Jose, CA, the annual conference focuses on the timeliest research and development topics in optical science and engineering, with eight conference tracks, FiO 1 through FiO 8, on Optical Design and Instrumentation, Optical Sciences, Optics in Biology and Medicine, Optics in Information Science, Fiber Optics and Optical Communications, Integrated Photonics, Quantum Electronics, and Vision and Color, respectively.

To find out what's hot in each of the eight conference tracks, the Sunday night (4-6 pm in the Fairmont Regency Ballroom) "What's Hot in Optics Today" special event is a good place to start. Here, the Division chairs of OSA's technical groups will present overviews of recent developments in various subfields of optics in an informative and accessible manner. And hopefully you'll attend the Sunday evening welcome reception that immediately follows from 6-7:30 pm in the Sainte Claire Hotel Ballroom.

Beginning Monday, October 17 at 4:45 pm in paper FMI3, Cornell researchers present "Demonstration of Temporal Cloaking," showing for the first time how an event in the time domain can be cloaked using time-space duality concepts and novel split time-lenses.

On Wednesday, October 19 at 11:45 am, don't miss paper FLW4 entitled "Controlled Synthesis of Gold Nanorods and Application to Brain Tumor Delineation" in which a Duke University research team explains how they are using gold nanorods for tumor delineation due to their unique optical properties and biocompatibility; the nanorods effectively label tumors within brain slices.

And just after that during Wednesday's poster session from 12-1:30 pm, a team from UC Davis presents poster JWA8, "Microscopy and Spectroscopy on a Cell Phone." Laser Focus World has been covering cell-phone-based photonics for a while now, but the applications (no pun intended; is there an app for that?) continue to grow.



IMAGE: From left to right, blood-cell images showing normal, iron deficiency anemia, and sickle cell anemia types of blood are compared when using a traditional microscope (upper) and the iPhone microscope (lower). The iPhone details are clearly adequate enough to distinguish between the three blood samples. (Courtesy UC Davis)
And although this video is a few years old, Aydogan Ozcan from UCLA explains in simple terms the benefit of cell-phone microscopy:



There is also another good video from UC Berkeley on their CellScope at http://youtu.be/5qcJySNLs84.

Moving right along (it's easy to get caught up in this "smart" phone world) … don't miss the Wednesday afternoon presentation at 4 pm (paper FWW1) entitled "Bio-Inspired Photonic Nanostructures and Lasers" to see how Yale University physicists are creating biomimetic-based photonic nanostructures that confine light, leading to efficient lasing that is tuned via structural parameters.

In addition to the Monday morning (8-noon) Plenary session in the Fairmont Regency Ballroom, the exhibit hall will be open on Tuesday, October 18 from 10-4 pm, and Wednesday, October 19 from 10-2 pm. So far, a total of 80 exhibitors will be available to actually show how ground-breaking research is being translated into helpful research tools and useful, everyday products.

Laser Focus World chief editor Conard Holton and I will be attending the show off and on from Sunday through Thursday; please email me at gailo@pennwell.com if you have some interesting FiO-related research or product development news to share with us either before, during, or after the conference. See you there!