OSA Podblog

OSA thrilled to conduct an interview with George E. Smith, the recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics, just two days after he learned that he won the Nobel Prize for his work on the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor. Take a listen to Tom’s exclusive interview with George on where he was when he heard, what it was like to win the Nobel Prize and the milestone work that lead to it.

This is the first of a series of podcasts about articles in Optics & Photonics News, the monthly magazine of the Optical Society. In this month’s podcast, OPN Managing Editor Christina Folz talks with OPN Senior Writer/Editor Patricia Daukantas about how to choose an ethical career in the field of optics. She also discusses the ethics of scientific publishing with OSA Fellow Anthony Campillo. Tony is OSA’s Senior Director of Science Policy, and he also heads the Society’s ethics review panel.

OPN Home Page: www.osa-opn.org

In 1997, OSA Honorary Member William Phillips was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics—along with his colleagues Steven Chu and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji—for developing a method for using laser light to chill gases to within a few millionths of a degree of absolute zero. Phillips is currently building on his laser-cooling work to investigate new possibilities for computing using quantum mechanical phenomena. He leads a research group on quantum computing at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. In this exclusive OPN Podcast, OPN Managing Editor Christina Folz catches up with Phillips about his Nobel-winning work, what's he"s been up to lately, and what’s next for the exciting field of quantum computing.

OPN Home Page: www.osa-opn.org

At the OSA 2009 Winter Leadership meeting held in Washington, DC in February, Professor Steven Vogt from the University of California presented a unique plenary talk describing the characteristics of some of the 250 planets that have already been discovered using ground-based telescopes and precise optical metrology. His presentation included images created by an artist hired to capture the atmosphere of those planets based on the scientific information collected.  They use a marriage of scientific data and visualization to capture all of the brain, both logical and creative.

Direct download

PDF Presentation

OSA Honorary Member Nicolaas Bloembergen shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics for his significant contributions to laser spectroscopy and nonlinear optics. OPN writer Patricia Daukantas conducted exclusive interviews with Bloembergen and with OSA Fellow Robert Boyd, who co-organized a symposium celebrating 50 years of laser theory at Frontiers in Optics (FiO), the Society's 92^nd Annual Meeting in Rochester, N.Y., U.S.A.

Listen to this podcast now

OPN"s home page:
http://www.osa-opn.org

Nicolaas Bloembergen:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1981/index.html
http://www.optics.arizona.edu/faculty/Resumes/Bloembergen.htm

Robert Boyd:
http://www.optics.rochester.edu/workgroups/boyd/nonlinear.html
http://www.optics.rochester.edu/workgroups/boyd/nonlinear.html

At the Frontiers in Optics conference in October 2008, OSA marked the 50^th anniversary of the classic paper on laser theory by Arthur L. Schawlow and Charles Hard Townes. OPN writer Patricia Daukantas conducted an exclusive interview with the 93-year-old Townes, a Nobel laureate and OSA Honorary Member, about his groundbreaking research.

OPN's home page:
http://www.osa-opn.org

The Schawlow-Townes paper ("Infrared and Optical Masers,” Phys. Rev. 112, 1940 [1958]):
http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PR/v112/i6/p1940_1