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NSBP Member, Hakeem Oluseyi, selected to be a TEDGlobal 2012 Fellow March 31, 2012

Posted by admin in : Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASTRO), Cosmology, Gravitation, and Relativity (CGR), Earth and Planetary Systems Sciences (EPSS), History, Policy and Education (HPE), Photonics and Optics (POP), Technology Transfer, Business Development and Entrepreneurism (TBE) , add a comment
Florida Institute of Technology professor, Hakeem Oluseyi, has been selected to be 2012 TED Global Fellow.  He will participate in the TED conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, June 25-29.  Dr. Oluseyi is an astrophysicist, inventor and science educator whose research focuses on measuring the structure and evolution of the Milky Way galaxy and characterizing new planetary systems.  Oluseyi has lectured widely in the US and Africa.  He was one of the founding members of the African Astronomical Society and is currently an officer of the National Society of Black Physicists.  TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design.  Past TED Fellows include CERN’s Bilge Demirkoz, Harvard’s Michelle Borkin, and NASA’s Lucianne Walkowicz.
 
Dr. Hakeem M. Oluseyi is an astrophysicist with research interests in the fields of solar and stellar variability, Galactic structure, and technology development.   After receiving his B.S. degrees in Physics & Mathematics from Tougaloo College in 1991, he went on earn his Ph.D. at Stanford University with an award winning dissertation, "Development of a Global Model of the Solar Atmosphere with an Emphasis on the Solar Transition Region."  His Ph.D. adviser was legendary astrophysicist, Arthur B. C.  Walker.
 
During his tenure at Stanford, Oluseyi participated in the pioneering application of normal-incidence, EUV multilayer optics to astronomical observing as a member of the Stanford team that flew the Multi-Spectral Solar Telescope Array (MSSTA) in a series of rocket flights from 1987 to 1994.  This technology has now become the standard for solar EUV imaging.  He was a major contributor to the analyses that illustrated flows in solar polar plumes for the first time and also showed for the first time that plumes were not the sources of the high-speed solar wind as was believed.  He also led the effort that discovered the structures responsible for the bulk of solar upper transition region (plasmas in the temperature range from 0.1 – 1.0 MK) emission and ultimately presented a new model for the structure of the Sun's hot atmosphere. 
 
After leaving Stanford in 1999 Dr. Oluseyi joined the technical staff at Applied Materials, Inc. where he invented several new patented processes for manufacturing next-generation, sub 0.1-micron, refractory metal transistor gate electrodes on very thin traditional and high-k dielectrics.  He also developed patented processes for in-situ spectroscopic process control and diagnostics, facilitating elimination of test wafers in semiconductor manufacturing.  This work has resulted in 7 U.S.  patents and 4 E.U.  patent.
 
In 2001 Dr. Oluseyi joined the staff of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) as an Ernest O. Lawrence Postdoctoral Fellow.  There he established a new laboratory, the CCD Production Facility, and developed new techniques for characterizing and packaging large-format, thick (300 micron), p-channel charge coupled devices (CCDs).  As a member of the SuperNova Acceleration Probe (SNAP) satellite collaboration and the Supernova Cosmology Project at LBNL, Dr. Oluseyi participated in the development of high-resistivity p-channel CCDs and performed spectroscopic observation of supernovae utilizing the Shane Spectrometer on the Lick Observatory's Nickel 3-m telescope. 
 
In January 2004 Dr. Oluseyi joined the physics faculty of The University of Alabama in Huntsville where he continued his research in solar physics, cosmology, and technology development but also focused on increasing the number of Black astrophysicists.   His efforts have thus far resulted in producing one of only two Black female solar physicists working in the U.S., mentoring a total of three African American graduate students, and six African graduate students. 
 
Oluseyi also began working extensively in Africa beginning in 2002.  He visited hundreds of schools and worked directly with thousands of students in Swaziland, South Africa, Zambia, Tanzania, and Kenya as a member of Cosmos Education in the years 2002, 2003, 2004.  In 2005 he began working with the South African Astronomical Observatory.  In 2006 he was the co-organizer of the 2006 Total Solar Eclipse Conference on Science and Culture.  Also in 2006, he co-founded a thriving Hands-On Universe branch in Nairobi, Kenya.  In subsequent years he worked with other teams dedicated to improving science research in Africa including the 2007 International Heliophysical Year conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and the First Middle-East Africa, Regional IAU Meeting in Cairo, Egypt in 2008. 
 

 
Also in 2008 he began working with at-risk graduate students in the Extended Honors Program at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in collaboration with the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) and the National Society of Black Physicists.  Oluseyi lectured physics and cosmology to UCT students in 2008 and 2009.  In 2010, he lectured and mentored students in the SAAO/UCT Astronomy Winter School. 
 
During 2010 and 2011, Oluseyi played a central role in establishing the African Astronomical Society (AfAS), the first continent-wide organization of African astronomy professionals.  He was a participant in the IAU-sponsored meeting of the Interim Leadership Group for forming the AfAS, and subsequently served as the Interim President of the AfAS until its official launch in April 2011. 
 
In May 2011, Oluseyi conducted a 6-city tour of South Africa as a Speaker & Specialist for the U.S. State Department.  During his visit he visited dozens of schools, museums and science centers, working with thousands of students, and a multitude of teachers, education administrators, and researchers.  In fall 2011 Oluseyi and professors at the University of Johannesburg won a grant from the U.S. State Department to found a Hands-On Universe branch in Soweto, South Africa. 
 
Oluseyi plans to return to South Africa to work with UCT students including leading observational research projects at the SAAO observatories in Sutherland.  Oluseyi also has ongoing research programs in collaboration with SAAO and University of Johannesburg scientists.
 
In January 2007 Dr. Oluseyi was invited to join the Department of Physics & Space Sciences at the Florida Institute of Technology.  He has since established a large research group that studies solar variability using space-based instruments, studies Galactic structure and stellar properties using periodic variable stars as probes, and is measuring the characteristics of extrasolar planetary systems using data from the LINEAR and KELT surveys and meter-class telescopes in North America and Chile.  He is a member of the Variables & Transients science collaboration for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.  Oluseyi recently founded the first observational astronomy consortium consisting primarily of minority-serving colleges and universities.
 

 
Dr. Oluseyi has won several honors including selection as a TED Global Fellow (2012), as a Speaker & Specialist for the U.S.  State Department, Outstanding Technical Innovation and Best Paper at the NSBE Aerospace Conference (2010), NASA Earth/Sun Science New Investigator fellow (2006), the 2006 Technical Achiever of the Year in Physics by the National Technical Association, selection as the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation Astrophysics Research Fellow (2003-2005), and as an E. O. Lawrence Astrophysics Research Fellow (2001-2004), and winner of the NSBP Distinguished Dissertation award (2002).
 

 

Industrial Masters and Internship Program at University of Oregon February 26, 2011

Posted by admin in : Chemical and Biological Physics (CBP), Condensed Matter and Materials Physics (CMMP), History, Policy and Education (HPE), Photonics and Optics (POP), Technology Transfer, Business Development and Entrepreneurism (TBE) , add a comment

You can earn a Masters degree and a salary one year through the University of Oregon’s Masters Industrial Internship Program. This program provides students with the real-world knowledge and skills necessary to be successful in an industrial environment.

The best way to judge the success of the Industrial Masters Program may be its history and its list of corporate partners. Over the last 13 years, approximately 90% of the students that have completed internships through this program have received offers for regular employment from their host company. We also have an impressive group of corporate partners such as Nike, Intel, IBM, Fairchild Semiconductor, Hewlett Packard, the Army Research Lab, ESI, Nanometrics, FEI Company, nLight, DataLogic and SolarWorld.

Through this program students have the opportunity to earn a degree from a leading research university and also learn what is required to be successful after graduation. We focus on the science and help you develop professional business skills that will allow you to be successful throughout your career.

The course work and labs are designed to help students become more effective problem solvers and will assist in developing your communication, collaboration and leadership skills. The labs are built to give students an opportunity to have experiences that closely mirror those they’ll find in industry.

The UO’s Masters Industrial Internship Program awards MS degrees in Chemistry or Applied Physics. Students entering the program typically have bachelor degrees in one of the following areas: Chemistry, Biochemistry, Physics, Chemical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or Electrical Engineering.

You can choose to focus in one of four core areas:

• Photovoltaic & Semiconductor Device Processing

• Optical Materials & Devices

• Polymers & Coatings

• Organic Synthesis & Organometallics

Internships/co-ops typically pay from $2,400 – $5,400 per month. Though internships are not guaranteed, the program has historically placed 98% of its students in internships and the program staff assists in every way to ensure you are a very competitive candidate for available opportunities.

To find out more please visit: internship.uoregon.edu

We are excited to talk to you about the program and life in Oregon–and to help you plan a visit to campus. The University of Oregon is located in Eugene in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. We’re a short drive from the Pacific Ocean, the Cascade Mountains and a two hour drive from Portland – the second largest city in the Pacific Northwest.

For more information:

Lynde Ritzow, Associate Director Masters Industrial Internship Program

T: (541) 346-6835

E: lynde@uoregon.edu

W: internship.uoregon.edu

Semiconductor laser diode produces stabilized optical frequency combs for telecommunications, metrology, signal processing and spectroscopy. October 22, 2010

Posted by POpBlOgs in : Photonics and Optics (POP), Technology Transfer, Business Development and Entrepreneurism (TBE) , add a comment

by Dr. Peter J. Delfyett, President, National Society of Black Physicists and University Trustee Chair Professor of Optics, ECE & Physics

A novel approach to generating a stabilized, phase-locked and coherent set of peri­odic optical frequency combs enables researchers to develop these sources at a frac­tion of the cost of conventional solid state and fiber based sources and thus facilitates their use in a broad range of information, sensing and measurement applications.

The use of lasers in communications, signal processing, test and measurement systems and spectroscopy has enabled many key advances over the past decades owing to the wide range of useful characteristics that accompany coherent laser radiation. Further advances are envisioned by using multiple lasers, each with differing wavelengths that allow parallel optical channels to increase the measure­ment and processing capability. Additional functionality is enabled if each op­tical frequency channel is phase-locked to the other optical channels, i.e., if the relative phase relation between each wavelength channel is well established and fixed and not drifting over long times [1]. To achieve a set of frequency combs with a fixed phase relation, one can use a single continuous wave (cw) laser and modulation techniques such as amplitude or phase modulation to create sidebands [2]. Further channels can be added through nonlinear optical interactions such as four wave mixing. In this approach, the characteristics of the optical frequen­cy comb, such as frequency stability and linewidth, is completely determined by the cw laser and the electronic signals applied to the modulators. Alternatively, one can use mode-locked lasers to generate a frequency comb with a phase co­herent relationship between each wavelength component. The drawback with a conventional mode-locked laser is that the frequency comb can drift owing to both environmental effects and background quantum effects, such as fluctua­tions in the background spontaneous emission in the gain medium of the laser [3].

Recently, Hansche and co-workers developed a technique that produces a stabilized optical frequency comb based on a technique that requires a mode-locked laser to possess an octave of optical spectra [4]. A salient feature of this approach is that the frequencies of optical comb can be generated on an absolute frequency grid, i.e., the optical frequencies are precisely known to exist at exact multiples of the pulse repetition rate of the laser. A drawback, however is that the laser must possess an octave of optical bandwidth, and generally, the pulse repetition frequency is suf­ficiently low that it is difficult to have access to the individual comb components, owing to their relative close spacing. This feature of the close optical frequency spacing then makes the optical source difficult to employ in commercial applica­tions, such as wavelength division multiplexed optical communication networks.

Our work has focused on developing an optical source that produces a set of widely spaced optical frequencies compared to the octave spanning ap­proach so it becomes suitable for a broad range of communication and signal pro­cessing applications without the need of an octave of bandwidth, and with higher spectral purity and stability of the cw modulated approach. The approach is also self-referencing in that the optical frequency comb is reference to a secondary optical standard, such as a high-Q etalon. To achieve the wide optical channel spacing and high spectral purity, we engineer the optical cavity so that the gen­erated optical frequency comb has wide channel spacing and simultaneously a very narrow linewidth for each “tooth” of the frequency comb. These charac­teristics allow the source to possess very low noise, and possess excellent spec­tral purity for each comb component. In addition, our approach can be performed using any gain medium, e.g., semiconductor, so that the produced comb can be placed anywhere within the optical spectrum, e.g., uv, visible, near infrared, etc.

To achieve a stabilized comb of coherent, phase-locked optical fre­quencies, we engineer the optical cavity to possess wide mode spacing and nar­row linewidth. This is achieved by employing a nested cavity configuration that combines two cavities, where the main cavity has a finesse of 100 and a free spectral range of ~ 5.6 MHz, and a secondary internal cavity with a finesse of 1000 and a free spectral range of 10.287 GHz. The combined cavities gener­ate a frequency comb with a spacing determined by the internal cavity, and in­dividual narrow comb linewidths defined by the main cavity. The free spectral range of the secondary cavity also defines the laser’s pulse repetition frequency. The laser system schematic is shown in Fig. 1. The system may be regarded in two parts; the actively mod-locked laser cavity, and the Pound-Drever-Hall op­tical stabilization loop. A dispersion compensating fiber section of 3.5 meters is included to reduce the cavity dispersion. Active mode-locking is achieved via loss modulation using a Mach-Zehnder style modulator at 10.287 GHz. The driving signal to the modulator is obtained from an ultra low noise oscillator.

The purpose of the internal cavity Fabry Perot etalon (FPE) is two­fold. First, the inclusion of the etalon allows only a single phase locked mode group, or supermode, to lase. Without the inclusion of the etalon, ~1830 inter­leaved supermodes will compete, and the resulting random fluctuations in ampli­tude and phase will disturb the output pulse train. This noise manifests itself in the timing and amplitude noise spectra as a series of noise spurs, called super­mode noise, at multiples of the cavity fundamental frequency (5.6 MHz in this case). Also, the simultaneous lasing of different optical supermodes precludes the use of a single phase locked frequency comb with multigigahertz spacing. In the frequency domain, the FPE may be considered as a periodic bandpass filter that selects a single optical supermode. Without stabilization of the laser cav­ity, however, environmental influences will cause the optical frequencies to drift relative to the transmission peaks of the FPE. These frequency fluctuations will destabilize the mode-locking. The modes of the laser cavity are therefore stabi­lized to the FPE with the Pound-Drever-Hall (PDH) laser frequency stabilization method. The PDH stabilization loop uses the FPE to detect small changes to the optical frequencies of the laser to create an error signal that, after conditioning by a proportional gain-integration-differentiation (PID) controller, is fed back into a piezoelectric actuator to compensate for the frequency change. Thus supermode suppression and optical frequency stabilization are achieved simultaneously with a single intracavity FPE. The resulting performance of this laser produces a spectrally flat stabilized optical frequency comb of ~ 200 comb components on a 10.24 GHz grid. The individual comb linewidth is <500Hz with a stability of ~150 kHz, and has >50dB contrast. The generated periodic pulse train has an over­all timing jitter (1 Hz to 100 MHz) of ~ 3 femtoseconds, with an intensity noise of 0.023%. To our knowledge, this is the lowest jitter multi-gigahertz stabilized optical comb source. Owing to its well defined stable optical comb and low phase noise this laser has applications in photonic analog to digital conversion, coher­ent communication, arbitrary waveform generation and optical clock distribution.

To realize the potential processing speeds and accuracy that photonics promises, the use of stabilized phase coherent optical fre­quency combs is a step toward that vision. Our work shows that the gen­eration of stabilized optical frequency combs can be obtained with excel­lent stability without the need of octave spanning spectra with the cost effectiveness, electrical efficiency, and compactness of semiconductor diode lasers.

References

1. P. J. Delfyett, S. Gee, M. Choi, H. Izadpanah, W. Lee, S. Ozharar, F. Quinlan, T. Yilmaz, “Optical Frequency Combs from Semiconductor Lasers and Ap­plications in Ultra-wideband Signal Processing and Communications, IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology, Vol. 24, No. 7, pp. 2701-2719, (2006).

2. Sarper S. Ozharar, F. Quinlan, I. Ozdur, S. Gee, P. J. Delfyett, “Ultraf­lat Optical Comb Generation by Phase-Only Modulation of Continuous-Wave Light,” IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett., Vol. 20, No. 1, 36-38 (2008).

3. S. Gee, S. Ozharar, F. Quinlan, J. J. Plant, P. W. Juodawlkis, and P. J. Delfyett, “Self stabilization of an actively mode-locked semiconductor based fiber ring laser for ultra-low jitter”, IEEE Photon. Tech. Lett., Vol. 19, No. 7, 498-500 (2007).

4. J. Reichert, R. Holzwarth, T. Udem, and T. W. Hänsch, “Measuring the frequen­cy of light with mode-locked lasers,” Opt. Commun., vol. 172, p. 59, (1999

Doing Business with DOE February 10, 2009

Posted by NPPblogs in : Acoustics (ACOU), Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASTRO), Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics (AMO), Chemical and Biological Physics (CBP), Condensed Matter and Materials Physics (CMMP), Cosmology, Gravitation, and Relativity (CGR), Earth and Planetary Systems Sciences (EPSS), Fluid and Plasma Physics (FPP), Mathematical and Computational Physics (MCP), Nuclear and Particle Physics (NPP), Photonics and Optics (POP), Physics Education Research (PER) , add a comment

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ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?

· Paid undergraduate science research internships?

· Summer research positions for faculty and student teams at a national laboratory?

· Careers with the Federal government or national laboratories?

· Graduate fellowships and Post-Doc appointments?

The Department of Energy is looking for you…

Come see us in the DOE Pavilion

Learn how you can work alongside scientists and engineers experienced at mentoring who want to transfer science knowledge by collaborative research. These programs are for undergraduate students from four year institutions, community colleges, or for students who are preparing to become K-12 science, math or technology teachers and for undergraduate faculty. Internships are available at all DOE national labs.

Up to 8 qualified undergraduate students will be considered for placement in the summer of 2009. The laboratories also have graduate and post-doc opportunities. We look forward to seeing you in Nashville! Please come join us at Booth 304 and the other booths in the DOE Pavilion in the Exhibit Hall Thursday and Friday or at any of the following activities and workshops:

Physics Diversity Summit: Discussion with Bill Valdez, Director, Office of Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists

Date: Wednesday, February 11

Time: 2:00 PM

Workshop: Brookhaven National Laboratory –On Using Photons

Date: Thursday, February 12

Time: 2:00 – 3:30 PM and 4:00 – 5:30 PM

Workshop: Oakridge National Laboratory—On Using Neutrons

Date: Friday, February 13
Time: 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM; 5:00-6:30 PM

Doing Business with Department of Energy—Research and Grants

Date: Friday, February 13

Time: 3:00 – 4:30 PM