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It's a great time to be in photonics

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It’s a great time to be in the field of photonics -- those were the words of Mike Dunne speaking earlier this year to a standing-room-only audience gathered for his plenary talk at the SPIE Photonics Europe meeting in Brussels.
Dunne -- who at that time was with the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council and the HiPER project and has since moved to the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Lab -- is in a good position to know. He and NIF Director Ed Moses and others are at the forefront of work pursuing fusion as a source of sustainable, clean, affordable energy. Not only is that exciting science, but it’s an extremely worthy goal that will benefit people around the world and the physical environment along with us.
My objective for this blog is to celebrate photonics research and development, with the help of guest authors from the SPIE community and your comments as well. Look on Photonics for a Better World as a vehicle to carry the conversation -- to talk about news and advances, to connect people with projects of interest, and to note the many ways photonics technologies are applied to bettering life in all corners of the planet.
And as Mike Dunne pointed out last April, there is plenty to talk about. What is happening in your area of photonics to fire your enthusiasm? 
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  1. Unknown04 February, 2011 00:01

    Hi

    My name is Peter Waugh and I enjoyed visiting SPIE in San Diego in 2008. Since graduating from Surrey University I spent a year in China teaching Physics (IFY) and IDE electronics at U/G level, then spent a year in Egypt teaching electronics and now I am at Sharda University in India, where I have taught microprocessors and am currently teaching VLSI and Optical Networks. As far as my somewhat frustrated photonics aspirations go suffice it to say that I am interested in Photon Emiting Devices as not only can they have telecoms applications but also increase the storage ability as frequency squared and so monitoring of two-six compounds and successors would be helpful. Also vitally interesting is the pursuit of WDM solutions for intra and infra module comms in ULSI and finally and somewhat lesser baked is the thought that maybe just maybe Quantum Computing and Communications might not deliver the goods in the short/medium term (i.e. 20-50 years) and so to address high speed computing requirement in the shortfall would require some kind of resuscitation of optical computing and therefore optical regeneration and nanoscale silicon lasing, which certainly sounds like a considerable challenge.
    I hope these partly baked comments amuse,
    Best wishes,
    Peter Waugh.

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