Tag: Newsletter

Our new 3D lab printer makes strange Gothic support scaffolding.

In the grand science geek tradition, proposal success is often celebrated by the ritual baking of themed cupcakes. NASA funded my phase 1 proposal to build holographic laser tweezers for the International Space Station! Holographic laser tweezers are about as cool as they sound - beams of laser light that can

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It turns out it’s surprisingly difficult to take a selfie in a welding helmet, as its safety shutter is triggered by the phone screen’s brightness. Squinting at a steep angle seems to do the trick.

Lab space heater is happy!

It turns out sapphire is a very useful high-tech material, due to its hardness, insulating properties, optical transparency, and thermal conductivity. By starting with a tiny seed crystal, a huge column of highly pure crystal can be slowly drawn out of a molten vat, producing big honking specimens like

But are these optics free range? And what about added sugar? Spotted at Photonics West 2015, at the OPCO Laboratory booth.

This is the nanolaser equivalent of being smacked in the face with a slab of corrugated roofing during a tornado. There’s one step in making microscopic lasers where you have to peel away metal from much of the substrate, leaving behind pillar-shaped lasers surrounded by small metallic patches.

I finished my PhD! (!!!) Thanks so much to all of you for following so far, and giving me a use for the interesting images that wouldn’t necessarily make it to publication. I’m glad I’m not the only one amused by strange-looking dust [http://lewisandquark.tumblr.com/

On the right: a photonic nanostructure, used in researching new light-based ways to make computers communicate faster. On the left: a single human hair (oops). Fortunately, according to Dr. Felipe Vallini of UCSD (who made and imaged this structure): “A hair hit my device, but he is still fine!