CELEBRATE THE 50th Anniversary of the Laser at LASERFEST 2010!

"GOLDEN JUBILEE OF LASERS: PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE"

TAKING PLACE AT THE IEEE/PHOTONICS SOCIETY ANNUAL CONFERENCE DENVER MARRIOT TECH CENTER

7, November 2010 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.

Lasers are being widely used in our daily lives and we cannot imagine life without lasers in the modern world. In 2010, we are celebrating LaserFest based on the development of first Ruby Laser by Theodore Maiman in 1960. IEEE Photonics Society has been a founding partner of the LaserFest and activities are being held throughout the year to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of Laser development. IEEE Photonics Society and its members played a crucial role in the development of lasers, as part of these celebrations.

Three Laser Pioneers will give historical perspective and share their experiences in the development of lasers and give their thoughts on what the future holds for lasers:

Dr. Tingye Li, Formerly Bell Labs, Laser Resonators and Fiber Optical Communications

Professor Anthony E. Siegman, Stanford University, Laser Developments

Professor Federico Capasso, Harvard University, Quantum Cascade Lasers

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Freedom from Band-Gap Slavery: From Diode Lasers to Quantum Cascade Lasers
Federico Capasso, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, USA

Abstract: Semiconductor heterostructure lasers, for which Alferov and Kromer received part of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000, are the workhorse of technologies such as optical communications, optical recording, supermarket scanners, laser printers and fax machines. They exhibit high performance in the visible and near infrared and rely for their operation on electrons and holes emitting photons across the semiconductor bandgap. This mechanism turns into a curse at longer wavelengths (mid-infrared) because as the bandgap shrinks, laser operation becomes much more sensitive to temperature, material defects and processing. Quantum Cascade Laser (QCL), invented in 1994, rely on a radically different process for light emission. QCLs are unipolar devices in which electrons undergo transitions between quantum well energy levels and are recycled through many stages emitting a cascade of photons. Thus by suitable tailoring of the layers' thickness, using the same heterostructure material, they can lase across the molecular fingerprint region from 3 to 25 microns and beyond into the far-infrared and submillimiter wave spectrum. High power cw room temperature QCLs and QCLs with large continuous single mode tuning range have found many applications (infrared countermeasures, spectroscopy, trace gas analysis and atmospheric chemistry) and are commercially available. The unique physics of QCLs, such as an intrinsic linewidth smaller than the Schawlow-Townes limit, will be discussed

Biography: Federico Capasso is the Robert Wallace Professor of Applied Physics at Harvard University, which he joined in 2003 after a 27 years career at Bell Labs where he did research, became Bell Labs Fellow and held several management positions including Vice President for Physical Research.

His research has spanned a broad range of topics from applications to basic science in the areas of electronics, photonics, mesoscopic physics, nanotechnology and quantum electrodynamics. He is a co-inventor of the quantum cascade laser, a fundamentally new light source, which has now been commercialized and in recent years has been involved in fundamental studies of the Casimir force, including the first measurement of a repulsive Casimir force.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an Honorary Member of the Franklin Institute. His awards include the King Faisal International Prize for Science, the American Physical Society Arthur Schawlow Prize, the Berthold Leibinger Future Prize, the IEEE Edison Medal, the Wetherill Medal of the Franklin Institute, the Optical Society of America Wood Prize, the Materials Research Society Medal, the Rank Prize in Optoelectronics, the IOP Duddell Medal, the Willis Lamb Medal, the IEEE David Sarnoff Award, the IEEE-LEOS Streifer Award, the LVMH Leonardo Da Vinci Prize, the Welker Medal. He is a Fellow of OSA, APS, IEEE, SPIE, IOP and AAAS.

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Discovering Laser Resonator Modes by Computer Simulation: A Simple Engineering Approach Made Good
Tingye Li, AT&T Labs (retired) Boulder, Coloroda

Abstract: Prior to the first demonstration of the laser in 1960, laser pioneers speculated on the modes of an open resonator consisting of a pair of mirrors facing each other. This interesting problem was presented to Gardner Fox and me at the old Holmdel Laboratory of AT&T Bell Labs in 1959, where research on microwave antennas and propagation, and millimeter-wave waveguide and technologies were conducted. We took the simple engineering approach of calculating a wave being reflected back and forth between two antennas (mirrors) using the Fresnel-Kirchhoff formulation of the Huygens’ principle, which was equivalent to solving the integral-equation for the modes of the resonator by the method of iteration. A solution to such an eigenvalue problem was then not known to exist, since the kernel of the integral equation is non-Hermitian. This talk is an anecdotal account of the early discovery of the laser resonator modes by computer simulation, the following reaction of the physics community to our solution, other attempts to solve the problem, and further results arising from this iterative method of computer simulation.

Biography: Tingye Li retired in December, 1998 as a Division Manager in the Communications Infrastructure Research Laboratory of AT&T Labs in New Jersey. He is now an independent consultant in the field of lightwave communications and serves on the board of directors of several optical component and systems companies. Since joining AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1957, he has worked in the areas of antennas, microwave propagation, lasers, photonics technologies, and optical communications. His early work on laser resonator modes established the basic theory of laser modes and is considered a classic. Since the late 1960s, he and his groups have been engaged in pioneering research on lightwave technologies and systems, which have been commercialized and deployed in telecom infrastructures worldwide. During the 1990s, he led the seminal work with his colleagues on amplified wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) transmission technologies and systems, which revolutionized lightwave communications and facilitated the exponential growth of the Internet.

Dr. Li holds a Ph.D. degree from Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. He is a Fellow of OSA, IEEE, AAAS, PSC, and IEC. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering and Academia Sinica, and a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. He has received the IEEE 1975 W. R. G. Baker Prize, the IEEE 1979 David Sarnoff Award, the OSA/IEEE 1995 John Tyndall Award, the OSA 1997 Frederic Ives Medal/Jarus Quinn Endowment, the 1997 AT&T Science and Technology Medal, the IEEE 2004 Photonics Award, and the IEEE 2009 Edison Medal. He has been named an honorary professor at many universities and institutions in China and Taiwan. Dr. Li has been active in various professional societies, and was President of OSA in 1995.

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How the Laser Reshaped Optics
Anthony E. Siegman, McMurtry Professor of Engineering Emeritus, Stanford University, USA

Abstract: The laser has since its emergence brought to the universe of classical optics new capabilities, new concepts, new interpretations of old concepts, a substantially expanded repertoire of physical phenomena and technical possibilities, and even an expanded vocabulary of optical terms. Some of these result from the true monochromaticity of laser oscillators (the concept of temporal coherence is no longer enough); some from the true single-mode character of laser beams (even though many laser resonators and waveguides do not have orthogonal modes); some from the high intensities of laser beams (giving us the whole world of nonlinear optics); and some from the very existence of linear optical gain, which greatly complicates many classic optical phenomena. This talk will attempt to give an overview of some of the most notable of these changes -- and without even addressing the further array of bewildering phenomena that arise when quantum effects lead to quantum optics.

Biography: Anthony Siegman retired as professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University in 1998 after an academic career which led to 42 PhD graduates, numerous advances in lasers and laser resonators, a widely used textbook on LASERS, and his election to the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Science. He served as president of OSA during 1999 and since then has been involved in a variety of professional and community activities and in continued research and technical consulting in lasers and fiber optics.