High-Precision Femtosecond Frequency Combs and New Technologies for the Generation of Ultrashort and Clean Pulses

Sarah Hutter  - University of Konstanz

Femtosecond frequency combs are among the most precise measurement tools in existence. Sarah Hutter will provide an easy-to-implement guide for designing extremely stable femtosecond frequency combs. She will explain how you can tailor the noise properties and achieve extremely sharp comb lines at specific frequency positions and over an ultrabroadband spectrum. Since the approach maximizes the passive frequency stability, it does not require additional resources and is not limited by any locking bandwidth. She’ll also present a highly stable Er:fiber laser system and a new technology for generating 4-fs pulses with an extremely clean temporal envelope.

Sponsored By:

Sarah Hutter 

Photonic lanterns and fused fiber couplers:  Engineering light for imaging and sensing

Caroline Boudoux - Co-founder and Co-president at Castor Optics

Biomedical optical imaging, including optical coherence tomography, hyperspectral imaging, and confocal and super-resolution microscopy, is flourishing. Dedicated fused fiber couplers, such as photonic lanterns, enable us to advance these techniques by improving resolution, depth of penetration, and contrast. In this presentation, Boudoux will discuss novel fiber optics assemblies, such as double-clad fiber couplers, multimode circulators, and mode-specific photonic lanterns, developed at Polytechnique Montréal and Castor Optics, and show how they enhance image quality and sensing performance.

Sponsored By:

Caroline Boudoux 

Space laser technology advances

Lori Magruder - The University of Texas at Austin, Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics

 Dr. Magruder will share details about her team’s work developing ATL24, a space laser technology to map mysterious coastal areas known as the nearshore—the space between the shoreline and deeper waters. Bathymetric LiDAR uses spaceborne laser scanning to measure underwater terrain, because its green wavelength photon-counting LiDAR signal can penetrate the water column to provide both the water surface height and seafloor depth (up to ~50 meters) from 300 miles away. ATL stands for Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter (ATLAS) system, which is the only instrument aboard the Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2). This satellite is part of NASA’s Earth Observing System for measuring ice sheet elevation and sea ice thickness, as well as land topography, vegetation characteristics, and clouds. After ICESat-2 launched, researchers developed algorithms, tools, and workflows to extract bathymetric data, but much of the source code, tools, and datasets wasn’t made public. To address this, the team began work in 2022 on ICESat-2 bathymetric data product known as ATL24. Their work has a range of applications for coastal and marine science management, nearshore habitat research, as well as marine navigation and engineering.

Sponsored By:

Lori Magruder 

Multifunctional  Metaoptics:  From Science to Smart Phones

Federico Capasso - Harvard University

Metasurfaces provide an almost unlimited toolbox to design the wavefront of light in search of new phenomena and applications.   Using Matrix Fourier optics we have designed the spatial distribution of Jones matrices to achieve polarization sensitive imaging, a new type of holography with control of polarization in the far-field and Mueller matrix imaging.  Polarization metaoptics has led to an error-free biometric authentication system for smartphones. I will also present recent developments in large area metalenses for astrophysics as well as high efficiency broadband metalenses. I will conclude with our recent work on bilayer free-standing metasurfaces and the new functionalities that they enable.

Sponsored By:

Federico Capasso