My expectations of the Advanced Photonics Congress in Puerto Rico rise each time I open the list of speakers and see the freshly added titles of the invited talks.

Who will invest in the next generation of photonics R&D, given that components companies have so little to invest themselves? The following figure shows the annual revenues of various companies in the communications supply chain, their spending on R&D (where available), and the share of R&D spending to their revenues. Note that the R&D spending of companies like Intel, IBM, and Cisco are many billions of dollars each. Some are greater than the entire global sales in optics communications components.

I met Arash Mafi on the plane to Hawaii, when I was traveling to NLO 2011. I guessed he might be going for the same meeting because he was reading an Optics and Photonics News magazine. 

Hello! Hope y’all are doing well. The committee has already sent out the decisions on the submitted abstracts. Our contributed paper has been accepted for oral presentation. My undergraduate friends often ask me whether I become nervous to give a talk. As you know, it is not always easy to give them a straight answer, especially when it comes to a question like this. I usually escape by saying: “giving a talk is a lot of fun; all one needs to do is to talk”. In any case, I believe that all of us enjoy listening to good talks. The upcoming conference on Imaging and Applied Optics will provide ample opportunities to do so. The list of invited talks has already been posted on the website. I find some of them to be quite interesting and hope their timing will not clash. 

Everyone is back now from Optics in the Life Sciences in Hawaii – what a great conference it was!  Beyond all the optics related research that was presented, we found time to see some lava:

The most important thing to come out of this meeting was of course the conversations with my colleagues. The positive feedback on my talk has already lead to some key insights that will be incorporated into a current manuscript, mostly regarding phase information and limits to superresolution. A conversation with a colleague after my talk led to an idea for a calculation that I’m looking forward to starting soon. In short, it comes from recognizing that superresolution experiments usually involve molecules making multiple downward transitions, each carrying different information. My research obsession is understanding the theoretical limits to how much information can be extracted from a superresolution experiment, so these calculations will be fun.

• When will I get that dream job?

The mood at OFC 2013 was upbeat this year, based on both show floor and conference impressions.  Does that match with the market data reported at the event?

Is the light emission in indirect-gap semiconductors like germanium (Ge) inefficient? Is this indirect material considered unsuitable for practical semiconductor lasers? While learning elementary physics, all of us were informed that the answers of these questions should be YES. Even looking back 3 or 4 years, we all thought that “yes” was the correct answer.

Aloha everyone!  We are now almost finished with Optics in Life Sciences, 2013.  Our time in Waikoloa Beach has been fantastic, with warm weather, beautiful beaches, and enough sun to give those of us from the mainland a massive dose of Vitamin D.  Dr. Alex Small put up a great blog post on Monday, with pictures of lava rocks and snorkeling adventures.  I have also greatly enjoyed my time here and can't count how many sea turtles there are on the beach!