Colloquium

The OSC Colloquium series is a dynamic forum for the interchange of ideas, techniques and research in all areas of optics, wherein academic scholars and industry leaders lead discussions about groundbreaking research and open the floor to questions and comments. Students, faculty members, members of the optics community and the public are all invited to attend.

Colloquium is held on Thursday in Meinel 307 each week during the academic year.

Fall 2018 & Spring 2019 Lectures

  • OSC Colloquium: Maxim Sukharev
    Thursday, November 15, 2018 - 3:30pm - 5:00pm
    Speaker: Maxim Sukharev Topic: Exciton-Plasmon Nanosystems: Modeling, Understanding, and Predicting New Phenomena Visit our website for future lecture dates and speaker information: http://www.optics.arizona.edu/news-events/events/colloquium For a list of our archived lectures: http://www.optics.arizona.edu/news-events/events/colloquium/archive

    The rapid surge in manufacturing of nanostructured materials and significant advances in optical science open a wide variety of opportunities to field-test electrodynamics at true nanoscale. In this talk I will discuss the physics and modeling aspects of so-called hybrid nanomaterials, i.e....

  • OSC Colloquium: Thomas Milner
    Thursday, November 8, 2018 - 3:30pm - 5:00pm
    Speaker: Thomas Milner Topic: Optics for Medical Diagnostics and Surgery   Visit our website for future lecture dates and speaker information: http://www.optics.arizona.edu/news-events/events/colloquium For a list of our archived lectures: http://www.optics.arizona.edu/news-events/events/colloquium/archive

    Although for millennia the development of optical science and engineering has been intimately interconnected with the human eye, over the last few decades light has been increasingly used to image and treat pathologies in many other tissues.  These recent medical developments and...

  • OSC Colloquium: Zheshen Zhang
    Thursday, November 1, 2018 - 3:30pm - 5:00pm
    Speaker: Zheshen Zhang Topic: Entanglement-Enhanced Quantum Sensing and Communication Visit our website for future lecture dates and speaker information: http://www.optics.arizona.edu/news-events/events/colloquium For a list of our archived lectures: http://www.optics.arizona.edu/news-events/events/colloquium/archive

    Quantum information science (QIS) gives rise to unprecedented capabilities in sensing, computing, and communication. In this talk, I will first provide an overview of QIS and then describe our recent work on using entanglement, a unique but fragile quantum phenomenon, to improve the performance...

  • OSC Colloquium: Erik Novak
    Thursday, October 25, 2018 - 3:30pm - 5:00pm
    Speaker: Erik Novak Topic: Snapshot Technologies for Measurement of 3D Surfaces" Visit our website for future lecture dates and speaker information: http://www.optics.arizona.edu/news-events/events/colloquium For a list of our archived lectures: http://www.optics.arizona.edu/news-events/events/colloquium/archive

    Dr. Novak will present an overview of several of the techniques currently employed in industry for single frame (snapshot) measurement of various surface properties including stress, surface shape and roughness on both specular and diffuse materials, covering lateral scales from micrometers to...

  • OSC Colloquium: Mohammed Hassan
    Thursday, October 18, 2018 - 3:30pm - 5:00pm
    Speaker: Mohammed Hassan  Topic: Attosecond Electron Imaging  Visit our website for future lecture dates and speaker information: http://www.optics.arizona.edu/news-events/events/colloquium For a list of our archived lectures: http://www.optics.arizona.edu/news-events/events/colloquium/archive

    In the last decades, the developments in attosecond (attosecond =10-18second) physics enabled the real-time studies of electron dynamics in matter. Tracing the electron motion in its native time scale becomes crucial for the accurate clocking of microscopic phenomena. The attosecond...

  • OSC Colloquium: Garrett D. Cole
    Thursday, October 11, 2018 - 3:30pm - 5:00pm
    Speaker: Garrett D. Cole Topic: Substrate-transferred crystalline coatings Visit our website for future lecture dates and speaker information: http://www.optics.arizona.edu/news-events/events/colloquium For a list of our archived lectures: http://www.optics.arizona.edu/news-events/events/colloquium/archive

    Substrate-transferred crystalline coatings are a groundbreaking new concept in optical interference coatings. Building upon fundamental research in optomechanical resonators, these “semiconductor supermirrors” were first demonstrated in 2013, with the key advantage being the ability...

  • OSC Colloquium: Hari Krovi
    Thursday, October 4, 2018 - 3:30pm - 5:00pm
    Speaker: Hari Krovi Topic: An Efficient High Dimentional Schur Transformation  Visit our website for future lecture dates and speaker information: http://www.optics.arizona.edu/news-events/events/colloquium For a list of our archived lectures: http://www.optics.arizona.edu/news-events/events/colloquium/archive

    The Schur transform is a unitary operator that block diagonalizes the action of the symmetric and unitary groups on an n fold tensor product V⊗n of a vector space V of dimension d. This would have numerous applications...

  • OSC Colloquium: Eugene Arthurs
    Thursday, September 27, 2018 - 3:30pm - 5:00pm
    Speaker: Eugene Arthurs Topic: Recollections on a Life with Light Visit our website for future lecture dates and speaker information: http://www.optics.arizona.edu/news-events/events/colloquium For a list of our archived lectures: http://www.optics.arizona.edu/news-events/events/colloquium/archive

    Ever since I got my first degree, in applied physics, I was drawn into the field of optics and light. Almost fifty years later I can look back on a richness of opportunities for education and innovation in many important aspects of this exploding area. I spent most of my career in industry and...

  • OSC Colloquium: Mukund Vengalattore
    Thursday, September 20, 2018 - 3:30pm - 5:00pm
    Speaker: Mukund Vengalattore Topic: Emergent phases and novel critical behavior in open quantum systems Visit our website for future lecture dates and speaker information: http://www.optics.arizona.edu/news-events/events/colloquium For a list of our archived lectures: http://www.optics.arizona.edu/news-events/events/colloquium/archive

    Owing to the competition between quantum coherent dynamics and dissipation, the behavior of open quantum systems often conforms neither to unitary quantum descriptions nor to classical thermodynamic laws. In most cases, the presence of strong dissipation leads to the destruction of quantum...

  • OSC Colloquium: Jon Ellis
    Thursday, September 13, 2018 - 3:30pm - 5:00pm
    Speaker: Dr. Jonathan D. Ellis Topic: "IRIS: Intra-Tissue Refractive Index Shaping, a Scalable Manufacturing Technology for Refractive Correction" Visit our website for future lecture dates and speaker information: http://www.optics.arizona.edu/news-events/events/colloquium For a list of our archived lectures: http://www.optics.arizona.edu/news-events/events/colloquium/archive

    Altering the refractive index of both hydrogel materials and living cornea shows promise for ophthalmic applications. Our novel process, IRIS (Intra-tissue Refractive Index Shaping) uses femtosecond lasers in a mode that induces nonlinear multi-photon absorption and alters the refractive index...

  • OSC Colloquium Lecture Series
    Thursday, September 6, 2018 - 3:45pm
    Speaker: Dr. Elohim Becerra, University of New Mexico Topic: "Optimized Photon Counting Measurements for Coherent State Discrimination" Visit our website for future lecture dates and speaker information: http://www.optics.arizona.edu/news-events/events/colloquium For a list of our archived lectures: http://www.optics.arizona.edu/news-events/events/colloquium/archive

    Efficient and reliable measurements for the discrimination of nonorthogonal states of light are a critical element for quantum and classical communications. The intrinsic quantum noise in coherent states of light sets the achievable sensitivity limits of any measurement aiming to distinguish...

  • Colloquium: Linran Fan
    Thursday, August 30, 2018 - 3:30pm - 5:00pm
    Quantum photon conversion with integrated nonlinear photonics.

    The ability to manipulate photons is of critical importance for both fundamental quantum optics studies and practical quantum communication applications. While integrated photonic circuits provide the unprecedented power to realize complex photon control with minimized structures, most materials...