Applied Industrial Optics Day 1
Arlene Smith, Ph.D.
OSA’s Imaging and Applied Optics Congress kicked off with the Joint Opening Plenary Session.
Michael Totzeck (Carl Zeiss AG, Germany) opened the Congress with “Trends, Advances and Prospects of Optical Imaging in Germany and Beyond”, an insight into the development of optical technologies in Germany and the role of lithography in the miniaturization of optics, the drive to higher resolution imaging and in the application of optical imaging techniques in medical diagnostics.
Keith Nugent (La Trobe University, Australia) presented “Coherent X-Ray Imaging Techniques”. The latest generation of synchrotron source has lead to a huge increase in coherent flux, enabling a powerful new contrast mechanism for medical imaging.
Chris Dainty (University College London, UK) brought us through “Fifty Years of Image Science”, touching on the journey of photography from film through to miniature digital sensor photography systems in today’s mobile cellphone cameras.
The first session of AIO 2016, “Good Golly, Miss Polymer”, was opened by Hans Zappe (University of Freiburg, Germany) with a talk titled “Printable Planar Polymer Optics”. Hans spoke about the challenge of developing highly functional printable polymer-based integrated optical sensor foils. Applications of these foils include Bragg temperature sensors and Asymmetric Mach-Zehnder Interferometer (AMZI) temperature sensors. Next, Jaeyoun Kim (Iowa State University, USA) presented on “Minimally Intrusive Optical Micro-Strain Sensing in Bulk Elastomer with Embedded Fabry-Perot Etalon”. PDMS-based optical sensors can be used to measure the strain inside deformed soft material, with potential future applications in soft robotics.
After the lunch break, “An Eyeful Optics” session was opened by Brandon Redding (US Naval Research Laboratory, USA) presented a “High brightness fiber source with low spatial and low temporal coherence for optical coherence tomography”. The low coherence results in a low-speckle source, which is useful for OCT and other ranging applications. Next, Ivan Capraro (Adaptica Srl, Italy) presented “Mobile Integrated Optical Devices for Clinical Eye-care Practice”. Portable eye measurement devices are realized by miniaturizing optical imaging systems using tunable liquid lenses. Josh Hogan (Compact Imaging, USA) closed this session with his talk on “MRO: Tomographic Imaging for Consumer Applications”. Multiple Reference OCT (MRO) can be used in for home monitoring of Central Macular Thickness (CMT), glucose tracking and in biometric fingerprinting applications.
After a break for coffee and conversation, AIO continued with the final session of Day 1, “Age of Enlightenment”. Stojan Radic (University of California, San Diego, USA) opened this final session with his talk on “Highly Coherent Tunable Frequency Combs” derived from CW sources. Applications include ranging and acoustic recognition, SWIR spectroscopy and real-time spectral analysis. Mitchell Underwood (Nufern, USA) presented “2 µm Fiber Laser and Amplifier Development”, as the last talk of the Day 1. Mitchell described the challenges of developing a Q-Switched 1940 nm fiber laser with 15 W average power. Applications include precision tissue ablation for acoustic neuroma microsurgery.
We rounded out the evening with good beer and conversation and of course good views at the conference Welcome Reception River Cruise.
