Omega and Omega EP, not the watches

Hey everyone.. Monday afternoon I joined a guided tour of the Laboratory for Laser Energetics at University of Rochester. It was organized by UoR/LLE and the Optical Society of America.

OMEGA

The Laboratory for Laser Energetics, established in 1970, has been involved in major engineering efforts to build high power lasers. They conduct research on high energy density phenomena,  matter interaction, implosion and plasma physics. The OMEGA and OMEGA EP (extended performance) are two such major laser systems used to study matter under high power laser pulses. The OMEGA system delivers 40K Joules of energy from 60 focused UV laser beams to the target. Top right in the picture is a portion of the target chamber structure. 

OMEGA EP

The OMEGA EP (extended performance) system delivers pulses with petawatts of energy used for x-ray and proton radiography. Up front (to the left in this click) you see the top portion of target structure. Towards the back (top in the picture) are the amplifiers and beamlines.

Optics comes in all scales and sizes. Here were systems that required the construction of entirely new, custom buildings and dedicated power, air, cooling and resource management.. systems which deliver the kind of power that makes matter implode! At another extreme are nano and micro level optical systems fabricated on tiny chips, self powered and sometimes even disposable! 

Engineering can accomplish marvels!

Consulting in Optics

Hey everybody.. Today I attended the Minorities and Women in OSA meeting at Frontiers in Optics. They had organized a talk by Jennifer Kruschwitz on consulting as a career. Jennifer is always positive and fun to meet.. so it was a great to have her for the early morning breakfast event!

 

Jennifer has worked in both industry and academia, and consulted through it all. Today, she spoke about her perspective and experiences consulting and working in the optics industry.

Her most emphatic advice to anybody considering a career in optics consulting was to make sure we work on articulating and communicating well. Good communication skills are necessary in any job and must certainly be invaluable while consulting. Good communication is not just about being an extrovert. We need to really communicate solid technical content, maybe altering the level of detail that needs to be discussed, to anybody from any background, having any level of technical skills.

She mentioned consulting requires a stout heart. There are periods when there is no project and then bursts when there is tons of work! It requires a good support system at home, a plan-of-action for the down periods, a good amount of patience and persistence.

She advised wise investment of time and money.. such as acquiring skills and experience which may help in the future, publishing, writing and volunteering to get positive exposure and choosing the right projects to ensure you are on the track you want to be in the long run.

Some people just like owning their own work, setting their own path and really prefer to consult than work for someone. Some folks are simply faced with career dilemmas managing a young family or a two-body problem. Certainly consulting is a great option for all of the above. Setting about it with a plan and long term goals in mind, like Jennifer suggested, was certainly great advice!
 

Thanks, Jennifer for the great talk today! Anybody interested, Jennifer Kruschwitz works on thin films and optical coatings.

Cheerio and thanks for reading!

Off to Rochester!

Hey everybody..

It's Frontiers in Optics time again and I'm off to Rochester tomorrow! It'll be my first visit since graduation! Some of my best friendships and memories are from Rochester. I get to meet a lot of the folks at meetings and conferences. Some of my Rochester friends also work in the Bay area. But it's after a long time I'm going to go to the University, see my old offices and labs again.. meet everyone again! :)

We've had some good times at Rochester. If you are visiting for the first time, fall colors should be out about now.

And other than the University and neighborhood around, you could check out..

Niagara Falls..

Letchworth Park..

Cruise along on Lake George if you want to drive just a bit further.. lot of other places too.. just quickly spotted these clicks on my hard disk. ;)

But mainly I am going to meet old friends, catch up, check out everybody's latest at the conference, hang out and have some fun!

Hope to post a bit this coming week. Cheerio!

POC Diagnostics - A walk in the PARC

Hey everyone.. I’m back..!

It’s not as if stuff hasn’t been happening around here. Dusty blogs = all work less play. Yesterday I attended a very inspiring talk and I decided today I just have to take an hour off and summarize it here! 

It was Peter Keisel from the Palo Alto Research Center. PARC is an independent subsidiary of Xerox, and consists of about 170 researchers in 4 labs. This work on sophisticated point-of-care opto-fluidic detection from their opto-electronics group was super-exciting! I had been looking forward to meeting Peter Keisel and hearing more about his work. Finally everything came together at the N-Cal OSA meeting yesterday.

  

ref: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/

Diagnostics and testing of water, blood, and other samples often involves counting cells or particles of a certain type, defined by size, spectra or other characteristics. Equipment like flow cytometers are often used for such testing. But their size, cost and complexity limits their availability. Therefore, such testing is often conducted in dedicated labs and testing centers. Depending on the local infrastructure and perishable nature of the test sample, this costly and time consuming effort, sometimes may not even be possible. Hence development of compact, inexpensive and robust devices for point-of-care testing is a critical and active area of research. 

Peter discussed an opto-fluidic detection device developed by his team at PARC. The device contains...