InterOpto takes fireflies very seriously

The September 25-27 InterOpto 2012 conference in Yokohama, Japan, was far removed from its roots as a telecom show in the years leading up to the bubble. While communications and optical components continue to be a focus for the InterOpto conference and its exhibitors, the conference has expanded to include not only InterOpto 2012 (optics and photonics), but also BioOpto Japan 2012 (biomedical optics), LaserTech 2012 (industrial lasers), and the LED JAPAN Strategies in Light (LED technology) conference. In fact, the LED JAPAN Strategies in Light conference complements the US-based Strategies in Light conference held each February in Santa Clara, CA (with 4600 attendees and 200 exhibitors) as well as the Strategies in Light Europe conference (September) and the Strategies in Light China conference (May). Strategies in light deals exclusively with LEDs and solid-state LED lighting technology. In addition to the conference programming, nearly 185 exhibit booths across the InterOpto, BioOpto, LED JAPAN, and LaserTech conferences were assembled in one area.

The LED exhibit (60 booths) included a wide range of LED and illuminance testing products from Konica Minolta (booth L-146) including their new CL-500A Illuminance Spectrophotometer--a very compact spectrophotometer for evaluation of LED lamps and electroluminescent materials. Its advanced sensor measures CRI (color rendering index), illuminance, chromaticity, and color temperature for any light source in a laboratory environment or out in the field. Who knew Konica Minolta had so many illuminance measurement products? Their portfolio includes Chroma Meters to measure color temperature,
and whole family of other illuminance meters (including integrating spheres) for any application.

Within InterOpto's new JIAL (Japan Importers Association of Lasers and Electro-Optics) Global Technology Seminar at which I presented the keynote entitled "Mid-Year 2012 Laser Market Review & Forecast", companies such as Coherent, Spectra-Physics, nLight, Oclaro, Amplitude Systemes, NKT Photonics, and Jenoptik presented overviews of their latest technology breakthroughs primarily in the laser industry. Of particular note in the spirit of the 2012 50th anniversary of the laser diode, DirectPhotonics Industries GmbH presented "Ultra-High Brightness Direct Diode Lasers for Material Processing." Fiber lasers may be seeing direct-diode competition sooner than anticipated if DirectPhotonics can leverage Fraunhofer technology to hone its single-emitter-based, wavelength-stabilized, spectrally combined system into a 2 kW, 7.5 mm mrad beam profile at 9xx nm into a production-ready machine. Its current DirectPump 900 source offers 90 to 600W for pumping applications, with more products being added to their portfolio.

The InterOpto exhibit was 84 booths strong, with many US-based as well as Japanese companies represented. With smaller exhibitions, LaserTech 2012 (16 booths) and more specifically, BioOpto Japan 2012 (21 booths) featured some excellent seminars. BioOpto Japan included Shinoda Plasma's presentation on a Luminous Array Film technology for a deep-ultraviolet light source, Furukawa Electric's description of its live-cell, damage-free cell flow cytometer, Nippon Dental University's presentation on dental caries prevention with a low-power laser, and Tokyo General Hospital discussed the role of low-level light therapy (LLLT) for the treatment of pain. And on the environmental front, Shojiro A. Maki from
the University of Electro-Communications presented his work on NIR probes based on firefly luminescence--the ultimate biomimetics success story in harnessing nature's best for the photonics industry.

As I took some time to vacation in Tokyo and Yokohama and visit some of the fine-art galleries, I was reminded of Japan's close tie with the natural world. And back at the conference center, I was extremely pleased to see that Japan is making strong efforts to improve the environment with the longest line of recycling containers I've ever seen! The United States should take note in its future photonics conference
venues--just because we have more land for garbage dumps doesn't mean we need to use it for that; how about creating a firefly habitat instead?

Laser update keynotes InterOpto JIAL Seminar

At this year's InterOpto 2012 conference in Yokohama, Japan, Laser Focus World will present a mid-year laser market update and outlook (www.optojapan.jp/interopto/en/jial_seminar.html) as we prepare for the 2013 Annual Laser Market Review & Forecast to be published in the January 2013 issue of Laser Focus World magazine. The full 2012 Worldwide Market for Lasers report is available now through Strategies Unlimited (Mountain View, CA), the marketing and analysis arm of PennWell that compiles the quantitative data for our annual laser market review.

I was honored to be asked to keynote the new JIAL (Japan Importers Association of Lasers and Electro-Optics) Global Technology Seminar at InterOpto--a three-day event (September 25-27) with focused presentations on industrial laser materials processing (see David Belforte's mid-year industrial lasers webcast), ultrafast lasers, supercontinuum advances, single-photon counting and fluorescence microscopy, terahertz generation, fiber coupling and microoptics, biophotonics, and even measurement of aspheric and freeform surfaces. My keynote will of course focus on the laser market itself, which is intimately tied to all things photonic-related; lasers are in fact enjoying moderate growth as a $7+ billion dollar market (), and all indications are that growth will continue to be moderate through 2015 barring any unforeseen, catastrophic events.

The JIAL Global Technology Seminar is organized by OITDA, the Optoelectronics Industry and Technology Development Association (www.oitda.or.jp), and the media sponsor is PennWell's own Laser Focus World Japan, which now has around 12,000 subscribers.

So if you want to find out how the laser markets are faring, please attend the JIAL keynote at InterOpto on September 25. If you cannot attend, please be sure to register for the Laser Marketplace Seminar (www.marketplaceseminar.com) on February 4, 2013, held in conjunction with Photonics West 2013 in San Francisco, CA. As the "aftershocks" of the economic recession continue to rumble, it will be interesting to see how 2013 plays out for our laser industry--and whether our modest forecast will be accurate.

Fruit of the laser diode

In July 1962, Robert Hall and some colleagues at the GE R&D Center in Niskayuna, NY, succeeded in doing what researchers in other labs in the US, France, Russia and elsewhere were seeking: to create coherent light emission from GaAs junctions—giving rise to the first laser diode. In September that year, Hall published the results in Physical Review Letters and the rest, as they, is history.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of his seminal paper, you can listen to one of the leaders in more recent laser diode advances, David Welch, co-founder of Infinera, present a webcast on the past and future of laser diodes.

In the September issue of Laser Focus World, we celebrate the laser diode with an article by researchers at KMLabs and the Colorado School of Mines on using blue laser diodes to pump a Ti:sapphire laser—illustrating yet one more application for this extremely versatile tool that also enables optical data storage and fiber optic communications.

These two laser-diode-enabled optical applications, along with displays, are the reasons that companies such as Microsoft are now hiring hundreds of experienced optical engineers. This says much about current competitive markets and the powerful enabling roles that photonics play. Microsoft, Amazon, Google--with their readers and tablets, game boxes, fiber optic networks, and optics-based cloud farms—are prime examples of how far we’ve come since that time 50 years ago when a few researchers made a p-n junction semiconductor lase.

LIBS on Mars: nice plasma indeed

While everyone knows that ambient conditions on Mars are vastly different than those on Earth, it's interesting to see the practical results of this fact. For example, when laser-induced-breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is done on Mars, as with the ChemCam on NASA's Curiosity rover, the process unfolds differently than it does here in the great out-of-doors. The photo below shows this (but for now please put aside the fact that these images were taken of laser plasmas in a Los Alamos National Laboratory test chamber under atmospheric pressures typical of Earth and Mars). The image size is 75 x 75 mm; the target in both cases is a piece of metal. The Mars-like atmospheric pressure is about one-hundredth of the Earth-like pressure.

(Image: LANL)

And now the results, please. The ChemCam's LIBS setup has three spectrometers that work in the UV, the violet, and the visible and near-IR, respectively. The first analyzed rock, dubbed Coronation, is (or maybe by now, was) 2.7 m away from Curiosity. The resulting spectrum of 30 laser shots, seen below in squashed form (the larger version can be found at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/gallery-indexEvents.html) shows many lines of metals and other elements, including carbon and hydrogen. Interestingly, the hydrogen only showed up in the first laser shot, indicating that it was only on the rock's surface. Note the sensitivity (very small peaks for titanium and manganese) as well as the fact that the x-axis scale is somewhat nonlinear.

(Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/IRAP)

However, as I mentioned earlier, conditions are quite different here on Earth: instead of vaporizing rock, curiosity merely killed the cat.

Petawatts proliferate

Borrowing a phrase from a 2006 Laser Focus World petawatt article, it is even more true today that "petawatts proliferate." All petawatt lasers aim to deliver petawatt-power-level pulses. But to understand just why so many petawatt-class (or sub-petawatt-class) laser systems are either in operation or being developed, it's necessary to understand the petawatt pulse itself and the groundbreaking applications that are causing these laser powerhouses to proliferate. What is the petawatt pulse width, the pulse duration, the peak power level, and the frequency at which these petawatt pulses are delivered? And just what type of light-matter interaction studies and other applications make petawatt-level pulses so appealing?

In mid July, Laser Focus World reported that the National Ignition Facility (Livermore, CA) delivered 500 terawatts (0.5 petawatts or PW) to its target in a step towards laser-initiated fusion. The 1.85 MJ energy is generated by NIF's 192 laser beams in a football-field-sized structure. And just a month prior, we reported on Ohio State University's Science Center for Advanced Research on Lasers and Engineered Targets (SCARLET), which aims to deliver the same 0.5 PW power-level pulses from a much smaller facility with a one-shot-per-minute repetition rate (see image below). However, compared to NIF, the 30 fs pulsewidth SCARLET creates sub-millijoule pulses that have a lot of power, but cannot compare to NIF's 1.85 MJ peak.

At the extreme of the petawatt-class-laser craze is definitely the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI)--Europe's project that will increase the peak power of ultrashort-pulse lasers to a whopping 200 PW and peak intensities of 10exp25 Watts per square centimeter. Not yet built, the ELI will begin with a more modest 10 PW laser and advance to 200 PW by 2017. In his Photonics Frontiers article in Laser Focus World in January 2011, Jeff Hecht described some of the applications that make ELI and all petawatt-class lasers so exciting; for example, proton acceleration to the 70-250 MeV range is needed for cancer therapy and ultrahigh-energy ultrashort pulses enable photonuclear physics studies that could lead to nuclear waste disposal.

This year's OSA CLEO conference included a special Petawatt Lasers Technologies (CMD4) series of sessions, which detailed the following petawatt-class laser systems (a reference paper is linked for each):

CAEP China:
http://www.opticsinfobase.org/view_article.cfm?gotourl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eopticsinfobase%2Eorg%2FDirectPDFAccess%2FB6F01AC9%

APRI/GIST Korea:
http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/50174408/0-1-hz-1-pw-ti-sapphire-laser-facility

LLE University of Rochester, USA:
http://www.lle.rochester.edu/omega_facility/omega_ep/

In addition to these CLEO presenters, petawatt laser systems are proliferating worldwide; here are a few more examples of systems in operation or systems planned to be built:

Texas Petawatt Laser, The University of Texas at Austin, USA:
http://texaspetawatt.ph.utexas.edu/overview.php

Hercules Petawatt Laser, University of Michigan, USA:
http://www.engin.umich.edu/research/cuos/ResearchGroups/HFS/Experimentalfacilities/HERCULESPetawattLaser.html

Z-Petawatt, Sandia National Laboratories, USA:
http://www.z-beamlet.sandia.gov/facilities/petawatt.html

Vulcan laser, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, England:
http://www.clf.rl.ac.uk/Facilities/Vulcan/12248.aspx

XCELS, Russia:
http://www.xcels.iapras.ru/img/site-XCELS.pdf

PHELIX laser, Germany:
http://www-alt.gsi.de/informationen/wti/library/scientificreport2011/PAPERS/PNI-PP-21.pdf

One of the best YouTube videos available on the how petawatt lasers work and their many applications is from Todd Ditmire on the Texas Petawatt laser team. check it out, and I'm sure you'll see why petawatts proliferate and will continue to do so (at least until exawatt lasers arrive!).

Curiosity to Earth: the photonics have landed!

As we all know by now, the Mars Curiosity rover has landed -- congrats, NASA! I, along with millions of others, will be eagerly awaiting what Curiosity has to say.

Here is just a brief mention of some of the photonics companies and organizations that produced the lasers, sensors, and optics essential to Curiosity's misson.

One of the most important instruments carried by Curiosity is the ChemCam, originally developed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory (Los Alamos, NM); this instrument contains a laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) system that will spectroscopically analyze Mars' surface.

An early image taken by one of Curiosity's hazard avoidance cameras (NASA)

The spectrometers in ChemCam were produced by Ocean Optics (Dunedin, FL), while the plasma-producing Q-switched, diode-pumped solid-state laser at the heart of the instrument was developed by Thales Laser (Orsay, France). The Chemcam also contains laser diodes from 3S Photonics (Nozay, France).

Curiosity contains 17 cameras; some of these were developed by Malin Space Science Systems (San Diego, CA), a company specializing in systems for unmanned spacecraft. CCD cameras from Truesense Imaging (Rochester, NY; a former division of Eastman Kodak) will be used for high-resolution (up to 14.4 μm per pixel) photos of rocks and other surface material, while CCD cameras from Teledyne Dalsa (Waterloo, ON, Canada) will be used for navigation and hazard avoidance.

Many of the camera optics for Curiosity were provided by Optimax (Ontario, NY).

It should also be mentioned that radiation-hardened photovoltaic cells from Emcore (Albuquerque, NM) powered the spacecraft as it headed toward Mars (the Curiosity rover itself is powered by radioisotope thermal generators).

I'd like to thank these innovative photonics outfits, along with the many that I have not mentioned here, for a job well done! And I look forward to seeing the science results that Curiosity will be producing in abundance -- along with the sweeping vistas that make many of us want to put our own footprints into the surface of Mars.

Persistent surveillance pays off

During the SPIE Defense, Security + Sensing show in Baltimore, I had a very interesting conversation with John Marion, who is director of persistent surveillance at Logos Technologies, based in Fairfax, VA. Our talk was about surveillance imaging from aerostat balloons tethered to the ground to continuously observe what Marion said could be a “small-city size area”.
Aerostats made news in May with a New York Times article describing life in Afghanistan under the eye of the many spy balloons tethered at military bases and in cities. At a relatively low cost, such balloons provide the military with an unblinking, long-term view of important areas, helping to catch insurgents planting bombs and deterring ambushes.
In 2010, General David Petraeus, commander of allied forces in Afghanistan, had asked for help from all available intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets. In partial response, a 300-ft-long, untethered hybrid airship called LEMV (long-endurance multi-intelligence vehicle) was developed by Northrop Grumman for the US Army. Its first flight has been repeatedly delayed and now may be scheduled for November, according to one report.
To enhance the imaging capabilities of the much smaller aerostats, Logos Technologies developed its Kestrel system, which is a wide-area persistent surveillance system for forward operating bases. Its development includes novel imaging and stabilization capability for day/night operation.

To date such aerostats have relied on narrow field-of-view ball gimbal sensors to identify targets of interest. The Kestrel sensor enables 360° coverage out to extended ranges at moderate resolution, while cueing a narrow field of view camera to provide high resolution imagery of targets of interest.
The ground station system enables operators to monitor multiple regions of interest in real time, and allows for backtracking through the recorded imagery while monitoring ongoing activity (see video). This backtracking capability allows operators to detect and understand threat networks and operations. Since July, ten of the full day/night surveillance systems have been deployed to Afghanistan, with six more available as spares.

This spring the US Department of Homeland Security tested the Kestrel system for border security around Nogales, Arizona. A Raven Aerostar aerostat was fitted out with a Wescam MX-15 hi-res, narrow-field camera from L-3 Communications and a Kestrel day/night medium-res, wide-area persistent surveillance system. Thanks to the system, authorities apprehended 30 suspects on the first night of the demonstration and made a total of 80 arrests over the course of the week.