Free coffee, loaded dice and some very special fibers

So the free coffee is for anyone who reads the blog and shows up to my presentation tomorrow! As I had said I am firmly in the graveyard slot (SW4F.6 at 5pm in the RioGrande/Gunnison room). The picture I have put up has a connection to my talk (the content, I swear!)- be there to find out.

Why the dice is loaded is that some of the parallel sessions are post deadline and not regular. PDP papers are obviously a bit special as they report really new and innovative research.  So how can us 'regular presenters' be expected to compete for eye-balls and 'bums on seats' with these hot-shot PDPs?  Thus, I may even consider offering guilt free chocolate brownies to audience! I think a 10 hour flight trussed up in cattle class and to present to an empty room would be simply too much to bear, especially if I hear sounds of wild cheering and applause from the next room!

In my next post I will endeavour to give some context for my work on spiral PCF. Meanwhile you can find some of my work and freely download from http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/view/creators/Agrawal=3AA=2E=3A=3A.html

Having ranted I can now turn to the fun task of recapping some of the amazing talks I heard today.

One could have been forgiven for thinking that optical fibers and PCF were a somewhat mature and shall we say staid field. But the last 5ish years have brought back some of the giddiness that came when the first PCF reports were published. Sessions STuxD were simply brilliant. Now with PCF, it is possible to infiltrate holes with metal, or even semiconductors like Si. So in the future we may well have single crystals of Si (with diameters in micron) but length of meters or even kilometers! On the endface of a fiber (all solid SMF type)  it has been shown that nano structures such as lenses, 3D photonic crystals can be grown. Wow!

Tapering and other nanofab techniques can give us micro and nano fibers. Of course, materials such as chalcogenides have opened up the mid IR spectrum as well. The possibilities are endless...