Recently by Tim Hayes

iPhone controlling optical tweezers

If you find a normal computer mouse to be just a bit too drab, you might be pleased to hear that a joint research team from Glasgow and Bristol Universities has decided to use a more stylish solution.

They used an iPhone to control their experimental holographic optical tweezers, employing it to remotely see the resulting image as well as control the particle positions through the phone's touchscreen.

"There were no modifications required," commented Glasgow University's Miles Padgett. "In fact, it was actually quite simple. The iPhone is linked to our computer by free VNC (Virtual Network Computing) software, running on both the phone and the tweezing computer. This gives a two-way communication link at 5-10 Hz."

The team, including Padgett and Mervyn Miles from Bristol University, along with key researchers Graham Gibson, David Carberry and Martin Lavery, have filed patents relating to their integration of various interfaces with their equipment.

Besides the practical benefits and the style quotient, the team basically decided to try the iPhone "because it seemed like fun!"

By Tim Hayes

The Toshiba Fellowship Programme aims to strengthen UK-Japanese understanding through R&D activities in an industrial context. Now celebrating its 25th anniversary, it was the first scheme of its kind to be run by a private company, and several Toshiba Fellows have gone on to become professors and leaders of research groups.

The Programme is open to PhD-level researchers of EU nationality, currently studying or working in a UK academic institution.

The successful candidate will take part in leading-edge research activities in one of Toshiba's R&D centres in Japan. They will gain up to two years' experience, and will be able to develop their chosen specialist research area whilst receiving relocation assistance and other benefits.

This year the Programme focuses on fifteen research topics of interest to Toshiba in materials, software and media technologies. One of them is the development of organic functional materials for future displays.

Alternatively, applicants can suggest their own topics, demonstrating their knowledge and commitment to R&D.

The closing date for applications in 12th December 2008.

If you want to find out more, visit the Toshiba Fellowship Programme web site.

Good luck!

By Tim Hayes

Photon 08 kicks off at the Edinburgh Conference Centre on the campus of Heriot-Watt University next week, and optics.org will be there.

As you would expect from the UK's largest optics conference, there is a lot going on, including:

Optics and Photonics 2008, the biennial conference of the Optics and Photonics Division of the Institute of Physics.

QEP-18, the latest in the series of conferences initiated in 1973 by the Quantum Electronics and Photonics Group of the Institute of Physics.

An Industry Technology Programme with sessions of particular interest to those in the optics industry.

Plus an exhibition of the latest optics and photonics technology.

Photon 08 runs from 26-29th August, and I'll be there to report from the show and bring you the latest news. If you're attending, visit IOP Publishing at Stand 40 and say hello.

By Tim Hayes

You, robot

Is it a coincidence that Berlin, where the optics industry is so strong, is also the birth place of the most famous robot in movie history?

Babelsberg film studios in the city’s Potsdam region has been hosting film crews since 1911, when a studio with all-glass walls was constructed there. As Martin Roth of the Potsdam Institute of Astrophysics told me, Potsdam was also home to a cluster of astronomical observatories at around the same time. No doubt the astronomers and the film directors were equally desperate for Potsdam’s clean air and seclusion.

Berlin’s photonic strength is built on a tradition of applied optics, as I heard first-hand when I visited the city. So perhaps it’s not too surprising that the optical effects, lighting design and visual experimentation on show in Metropolis, the most famous silent film to come out of Babelsberg, were developed in a region that now features strongly here on optics.org and in Optics & Laser Europe magazine.

Courtesy of a chance discovery in Buenos Aires, Metropolis is being restored to its original length and will be seen in full for the first time in decades. The film has cast a huge shadow over science-fiction for the last 80 years, but it looks like we're only now going to see what director Fritz Lang and his team really came up with in a Berlin suburb in 1926.

By Tim Hayes

Tommy can you see me?

Stadium rock and laser displays go together like heavy and metal, and when The Who took the stage at the VH1 Rock Honors show last month in Los Angeles, they did so backed up by some serious laser fire power.

According to Lighting & Sound International, the contract for supplying the lasers at the show went to California's YLS Lasers, who employed "three high-power YAG laser projectors, five optic-fed remote scanners, three table scanners and over thirty stage mirror placements to give lighting designer Tom Kenny and The Who what they were looking for."

YLS handles the laser displays for a whole range of public events, including stunt shows, corporate events, parades, amusement parks and casinos. Which proves that not only are lasers still considered a fine way to liven up a public shindig, but also that some photonics professionals have all the fun.

I wonder about the connection between this sector of the laser economy and the kind of laser science you can read about on this site. Advances in laser technology are happening all the time, all over the world; we write about them every day. Does this feed through into changes in the kind of lasers and optical effects you can witness at public displays these days? Does anyone know?

At first I wasn't sure how Sony could claim an energy efficiency of 232% for its new Bravia JE1 series of LCD televisions, but the answer was in the small print.

Under Japanese regulations, the standard reference point for the power consumption of a 32-inch LCD screen is 200 kWh per year, designated as 100%. Lower consumption is expressed as a higher percentage compared to the benchmark. Anything above a 164% rating is entitled to receive a five-star Energy Saving label.

By that measure Sony's existing Bravia KDL-32J1 series comes in at 173% energy efficiency, with an annual power consumption of 115 kWh per year.

The new JE1 screens go further, hitting an efficiency of 232% for the KDL-32JE1, said to be the highest on the market for a 32-inch screen, while also reducing the momentary power consumption to 89 W.

According to Sony, the secret lies in the use of high-efficiency fluorescent tubes, capable of delivering higher luminance efficiency at lower electric voltage, along with specialized optical film that possesses a higher light transmission rate.

With the KDL-32JE1, Sony has also started to recycle the waste material generated during the production of the optical film used in its LCD TVs, claiming that doing so will effectively reduce the CO₂ emissions from its production process by an impressive 40%.

Sony already practices in-house recycling to produce flame-retardant polystyrene for its Bravia sets, and some of that apparently recycles plastics from CRT TVs. As shipments of LCD TVs overtook CRT for the first time last year, this seems only right and proper, evolution in action.

On May 16th 1960, Theodore Maiman changed the world when he demonstrated the world's first working laser. He made his breakthrough at Hughes Aircraft Corporation, by generating pulses of coherent light from a fingertip-sized lump of ruby illuminated by a flash lamp. The exact attribution of the invention has historically been a little problematic. Maiman beat a number of other physicists to the post, including Charles Townes who had earlier developed the maser, a microwave forerunner of the laser, while Townes' student Gordon Gould coined the actual word "laser".

How ever the credit should be apportioned, the results have been extraordinary, with lasers playing a huge role in our lives already and further breakthroughs nearly every day. You can be sure that the achievements of laser developers in the next 48 years will be every bit as remarkable as Maiman's ground-breaking experiment. And that optics.org will bring them to you.

The CLEO/QELS event kicks off on May 4th and runs through to May 9th, drawing the optics and photonics community to San Jose's McEnery Convention Centre for one of the showpieces of the optoelectronics calendar.

This year's technical programme will see more than 1800 technical presentations alongside short courses, tutorials, symposia and poster sessions. Hot topics this year include plasmonics and nanophotonics, single-chip integration and fibre lasers.

"The total submissions to the programme are up by 10%, and for some topics it's nearer 20%," said Aephraim Steinberg, co-chair of the QELS programme. "We've extended the technical programme to a full five days to make room."

Over 350 exhibitors will take part in the trade exhibition, while students, job seekers and employers alike can visit the Career Centre to attend workshops and network.

"CLEO has a niche, giving a breadth of coverage while ensuring very high quality," said Konstantin Vodopyanov, CLEO programme co-chair. "It's the universal clock, creating the rhythm in the field. It's like a heartbeat."

You can stay close to that heartbeat by reading the optics.org CLEO show blog, where our reporters will be bringing you the latest developments and the hottest news. Check back regularly as the show progresses.

For the last four years, Europe's politicians and car companies have been collaborating on the Continent's largest road safety project. In theory, the end result could be the uncrashable car, with optics and vision systems playing a crucial role.

PReVENT is an umbrella programme of nested initiatives and research projects working towards next-generation preventive and active road safety applications, encompassing a total of 56 partner organizations and a budget of more than €50 million ($79 million).

The objectives are ambitious and the acronyms are many. PReVENT aims to develop systems allowing the safe following of other cars (SASPENSE and WILLWARN), lateral support and driver monitoring (SAFELANE and LATERAL SAFE), intersection safety (INTERSAFE), and the protection of vulnerable road users and collision mitigation (COMPOSE and Use R Cams).

It's not just Europe that's looking to improve road safety by trusting technology rather than people. Last year we covered the Team LUX entrant in the DARPA Urban Challenge, and described the race's daunting requirement for driverless cars to obey all traffic regulations, safely negotiate around other cars and merge into traffic.

The eventual winner was a car from Carnegie Mellon University, which employed more than a dozen lasers, cameras and radars to view the world. It averaged 14 mph, and left in its wake competitors which variously froze at intersections, turned into oncoming traffic, and two which apparently drove straight into buildings.

These sound like software issues rather than defective optics. Infrared vision systems can sense a car's surroundings at least as well as a human can. It's how to interpret the resulting onslaught of data that remains the problem.

Team LUX's Jorg Kibbel was well aware of this when we spoke to him. "Our scanners have a resolution of up to 0.125°, a range of 200 m, and a field of view of about 200°. Even small objects right in front of the car can be seen. But in urban areas many complex scenarios can emerge, and the algorithms must produce the right answer. Complex crossings, lane changes, u-turns, and of course all the other robots in the race will have to be dealt with. Plus we will have to park the car."

Until accidentally doing so in someone's kitchen can be completely ruled out, PReVENT might have a job on its hands.

Trouble continues to brew in New South Wales, where the federal government is attempting to deal with multiple incidents of aircraft pilots being distracted by hand-held laser pointers shone from the ground at Sydney airport.

The problems are said to be escalating due to the easy availability of green laser pointers, which are widely used by astronomers, architects and other professions. Unlike older red pointers, which are typically under 1 mW in power, green sources can deliver more than 20 mW and are apparently long-range enough to reach aircraft on final approach to landing.

The ideal solution would be an outbreak of sense among those with the pointers, but in the absence of that Australia's legislators are getting twitchy.

After an incident involving an air ambulance, it seems that New South Wales will now class the most powerful types of pointer as if they were firearms, with proposed sentences of up to 14 years for carrying one without a permit. Holders of the old fashioned red variety will be treated more leniently, on a par with carrying a knife. Western Australia has reached similar conclusions, classing the pointers as controlled weapons with 12 months jail for their illegal use.

The NSW Premier has talked of banning hand-held lasers to "stop the potential for mass murder". No sensible person underestimates the importance of air safety, but what is language like this doing to the public perception of a very simple scientific tool? How long before the phrase "death ray" makes an appearance?

Is banning the pointers the only option?