50th anniversary of the Laser, Day 3 and a Train Strike

The 50th anniversary of the laser conference concluded (at least for me; there was a cocktail hour for bigger names which I did not attend) with the talks yesterday. We arrived about 10 minutes into Bloembergen's talk, so unfortunately I missed out on that. Weinreich's talk was entertaining, although I didn't glean much from it. Prof. Tokima's talk was very good, and for the most part I could follow him, although he lost me when he went into QED.

Kroemer's talk on the beginnings of Heterostructure lasers was very good, primarily due to his sense of humor and the speed (followable) at which he talked. I'm taking Optoelectronics next semester, so I hope to learn a bit more about semiconductor physics there.

I was a little disappointed by Dr. Aspect's talk, primarily because it seemed like the 70-80 minute talk he gave at UR condensed into 30 minutes. It was still good, but not as good as it could easily have been if he had been allotted more time.

The last talk I gleaned much out of was the talk on fiber optics given by Prof. Sir Charles Kao's wife and Dr. Desurvire. Apart from a history lesson, I learned that the rate at which fiber is produced per second is approximately 5x the speed of sound, on average.


I didn't go to Palaiseau today because of a train strike. I would have tried to go if Lei had had time to do labwork, but I ran into Lee (Gunderson) this morning who tried to take the RER in to work and found that no trains were running southbound on the RER until 430 PM. I took the opportunity to do some gift shopping instead, since this is probably the best opportunity I'm going to get. Now that I'm back, I think I'll try to read a paper on scattering from a periodic surface, a paper Fauchet references considerably in his paper on periodic surface structures after laser ablation.