Applied Industrial Optics Day 1
By Cushla McGoverin
Lights, camera, action. The 2018 Imaging and Applied Optics Congress kicked off with a plenary from Paul Debevec (Google VR, USA) about his work in virtual reality developing tools for both movie magic and immersive environments to get the environmental and facial lighting just right. “You say LIDAR, I say LADAR” and the LIDARs had the win (4 versus 1) in the first session of the Applied Industrial Optics meeting. Thomas Laurent (Eagleyard Photonics GmbH, Germany) described the qualification process for single frequency laser diodes bound for space using examples from several missions (e.g. GAIA and CATS MASA ISS missions). Sam Wilton (Argo AI, USA) outlined the advantage of Geiger-mode LIDAR in autonomous vehicle applications, in particular that it is long range (300 m) and reliable in variable weather. Simon Sørensen (Fraunhofer Centre for Applied Photonics, UK) described a converging LIDAR method for studying the 3D patterns of wind around wind turbines; important information for ensuring maximum efficiency in wind turbine performance. Bryan Bosworth (John Hopkins University, USA) and Fengqiang Li (Northwestern University, USA) went through their new methods for time-compressive frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) LADAR and compressive time-of-flight imaging respectively.
In “Spectroscopy, Microscopy, and Fiberoscopy” John Rodriguez (Ocean Optics Inc, USA) demonstrated a method for determining color parameters of importance from petroleum products. Tuneable diode laser absorption spectroscopy (TDLAS) featured in two talks. In the first Yanjun Du (Tsinghua University, China) describe a new implementation TDLAS: wavelength modulation-direct absorption spectroscopy. Richard Wainner (Physical Sciences Inc, USA) outlined the implementation of wavelength modulation diode laser absorption spectroscopy for the measurement of gas plume flow rate for the assessment of gas leaks. Emil Agocs (NIST, USA) discussed the assessment of uniform illumination in microscopy. Erik Bottcher (NYFORS, Sweden) described a process of using a donut of CO2 laser light which impinges the sample at an angle for various fiber processing purposes. This talk was followed by a demonstration showing several of the NYFORS products.
After the poster session we finished the day looking to the stars. Stefano Bonora (INFM-CNR, Italy) demonstrated multi-actuator adaptive lenses for the correction of aberrations in optical systems. In his talk he outlined an example that used these adaptive lenses for aberration correction in small telescopes; the resulting images were so good that faint objects behind the star Sadr were observed that are not listed in their reference catalog, which only lists objects with a magnitude greater than 15. Imran Khan (Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light & InfiniQuant, Germany) demonstrated a quantum random number generator after discussing quantum key distribution and how to circumvent the problem presented by the loss in long lengths of fibre (e.g. Berlin to Erlangen 450 km 90dB loss) – go up; use satellites to transmit quantum keys over long distances.
Non-optics fact of the day: The largest wind turbines have blades 170 m long, approximately the same length as the length from wing tip to wing tip of an airbus A380.
