Here I am, hoping to start a new good habit of posting to this site every Friday…Wish me luck!
-Today we will be completing work on a Final project report for an NSERC Engage project with local company Biokinetics. Hannah and Albane completed the final tests on a rugged impact force sensor and it interrogation system. The fiber optic configuration allows for high multiplexing of sensors over relatively small areas without significantly impacting overall system costs. Furthermore, the chosen design can be configured to force ranges from milli-Newtons to kilo-Newtons with minor modifications and without reliability risk on the optical fiber.
-Installation of our new ultrafast laser system was completed this week in Chris Smelser’s new lab in the VSIM building of Carleton. In addition to Chris’ own nonlinear optics and laser micromachining activities, this laser will allow us to pursue new sensing modalities involving short pulses of light and support Fu’s thesis work on nonlinear plasmonics. It will also be used by Hamed and Tingting in support of their PhD programs in nonlinear optical materials and on-fiber nanoantennas, respectively.
-We also started to move our tunable, pulsed picosecond laser system and associated instrumentation back from the Azrieli building to our own lab in Minto. This should be completed next week.
-Médéric visited the chemistry labs of Prof. Jean-François Masson at the Université de Montréal and is continuing his work with Profs. Willmore and DeRosa on aptamer based fiber optic sensing of breast cancer cells.
-Sondos successfully defended her PhD thesis last September and is now hard at work on putting the final touches on a journal article to be submitted shortly.
-Tingting recently returned from the OFS conference in Lausanne (Switzerland) and will be writing up an extended version of her poster presentation for submission to a special issue of the IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology.
-Violeta and I will be attending the Latin America Optics and Photonics conference, organized by the OSA, in Lima (Peru) next November.