Advanced Photonics Conference in Vancouver
Howard Lee
I am attending Advanced Photonics in Vancouver. I was also at the past Advanced Photonics Conference in Boston 2015 but this year is really special as 2016 is the OSA Centennial Year!
The conference started with outstanding plenary speakers, Prof. Larry Coldren from UCSD discussed his work on Optical Frequency Synthesis and Prof. Ming Wu from UC Berkeley gave a great overview on optical switching and his recent development on photonic switching with the design of silicon cross-waveguide and MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical systems) technology.
After the plenary session, 7 different parallel sessions were presented. Most of the time, I was in the “Novel Optical Materials and Applications” session, particularly the morning plasmonics, metamaterials, and metasurfaces sessions were held. All the talks were great on these 2 sessions, and there were several important developments particularly on metasurfaces reported. These include active metasurfaces such as nonlinear response, electrical tunablility, and reconfigurable phase-transition metasurfaces; conformal optics with dielectric metasurface, light-emitting hyperbolic metasurfaces, and high temperature metasurface emitter. All the reports are interesting and also show the current promise of the metasurfaces.
In the afternoon, I attendeded several talks on plasmonics. Dr. Ho-Pui-Ho from Chinese University of Hong Kong presented a fascinating optical trapping method for bacteria and live cells based on plasmonic absorption assisted heating. Dr. Cesare Soci reviewed their works at Nanyang Technology University Singapore on new materials for metamaterials using perovskites, phase change chalcogenides, and topological insulators.
The evening highlight was definitely the conference reception. This is the best food I ever have at OSA conference reception (normally they are good, but this reception was outstanding). Sushi, Dim Sum, Vancouver oyster and shrimp, different flavor of pastas, great desert, etc. The reception contained full of great food and atmosphere for the scientists to chat and networking.
I am excited to the second day of the conference, and also the poster session in the late afternoon of day 2
