Partially Coherent

Another year, another review. 2019 was quite a wild year for me, and whew, what a decade it has been! It's hard to imagine that at the beginning of the decade, I was still in high school. In chronological order, starting from 2010: I graduated from high school, served in the army, moved across the country, got my BSc, met five Nobel laureates, started a scicomm platform, got my MSc, moved abroad for work, moved back, got my PhD, got married, moved again across the country, and got a postdoc position. I don't think there will be another decade quite like this one for me! What was your year/decade like? Share in the comments! The winner of this years OSA photography contest, by Dr. Pascale Müller and Prof. Dr. Dan Curticapean: the cross section of a bean, imaged with a scanning electron microscope and digitally colored. Anyway, let's get to the sciencey stuff; here are the news that caught my eye from the past year: Nobel prize in physics This years Nobel prize...

It's that time of the year again, the time to look back on what was accomplished. I couldn't find the time or the energy to write this sooner, and I kind of left this to the last minute. But well, here it is now, the photonics news that really caught my eye this year: OSA Photo Contest winner Here is the photo that won this years annual OSA Photo Contest!  Shot by Tobias Tieß from Leibniz-IPHT, Germany, the photo features a glass cup filled with fluoresciing liquid and a UV-laser is coupled into the handle of the cup. Quite nice effect, I must say. The rest of the contestants can be found here . Nobel prize The Nobel prize in physics was awarded "for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics," To Donna Strickland, Gerad Mourou and Arthur Ashkin. I made a whole post on this, which you can find here for more info. SI system redefinition The SI system underwent a major overhaul! Or to be more precise, it was decided that it will be o...

As you probably know, the 2018 Nobel prize in physics went to optics and photonics. I cannot say I am surprised, since a lot of the physics Nobel prizes are awarded to this area, either directly or indirectly. It's still nice to see that the people who really deserve recognition are finally getting it. But what is their research really about, and why should we care? Let's start with Arhur Ashkin, who at the age of 96 years, is the oldest Nobel Laureate ever. Ashkin received one half of the prize “for the optical tweezers and their application to biological systems”. Optical tweezers are exactly what they sound like, a tool used to trap and manipulate minuscule things. The tweezers were born from the observation that a dielectric particle tends to move towards the highest intensity in a beam of light. So if the particle you are trapping moves to the edge of the beam, a restoring force will move it back towards the center. This force can be explained for Rayleigh s...

The year 2017 is very nearly over, and it is time to look back at what news the year brought in photonics. I will be covering here some of the things I found the most interesting. First of all, being a Finnish citizen, I must mention that Finland turned 100 years old on 6.12.2017! To celebrate 100 years of independence, there were several events all over the country and abroad as well. Company called Valoparta made the biggest art installation of all time, lighting up the whole Saana fell (a type of mountain in Lapland). Picture from  http://www.valoparta.com/luminousfinland100/ This is the first art installation of its kind, with 2.5 million square meters of illuminated area and it was visible from three countries, Finland, Sweden and Norway. And to top it all off, we had the good fortune of seeing northern lights above Saana at the time of the installation. Truly spectacular! Hard science Nobel prize The Nobel prize in physics  went  to the...

Hello to you and welcome to my blog! This is my first (actual) post here and I would like to start by telling you why I want to write about this particular topic. Like it says in the title, this blog is about physics and math, with an emphasis on photonics, so I will be writing about a large variety of things but keep coming back to that one special topic. I will not be talking (at least not too much) about the topics that are the most popular (and maybe the most controversial) in science, such as string theory, quantizing gravity or about the search for a theory of everything. Why, then, do I want to tell people about photonics? As you may have guessed, it is because I actually am qualified to talk about it, since it is my main area of expertise and I happen to have a formal education in it. The arXiv universe! The white dots are papers on optics, notice where they are centered? ( paperscape.org ) The way I came to do this line of work is rather unconventional. When I wa...