Lets face it, open source software is here to stay. It’s not a secret that we are regular users of Matlab, Mathematica and other proprietary software. Nowadays people have realized that for several tasks there are free alternatives, like Python. So, from ICONS we thought of helping people to discover this multi-uses tool.
We launched our first Python tutorial. It was an introductory talk about Python with hands on exercises.
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Written by Anshuman Singh
With the help of ICONS members, the department of outreach at our institute launched a new activity for kids called “Mission Impossible”. The objective was to reach a jewel crossing a laser beam security system, at the best Hollywood style. Afterwards, the kids had the chance to construct another beam path with mirrors and check it functioning!
Laser maze is one of the ICONS activities aimed to educate young students about direct application of light in daily life. It’s a simple game we play with the students, where we ask them to cross the hallway to get an object sitting on other side of the hallway.
Initially, they are unaware about the laser maze put on across the hallway, forming a security system with the help of a camera and a simple code runs on a PC. The students barely see the laser light, and on their attempt to get to the object they activate the alarm by blocking the laser light with their legs.
Here, we introduce them the principle of laser maze and how it’s implemented in the hallway using an inexpensive diode laser, set of mirrors, and a camera. We make them think how easily light can be applied to design a basic security system, taking advantage of its reflection property. This kind of application of light they see in automatic doors at public places in their everyday life. Lights and mirrors may make it feel like magic, but it’s really science and a method that’s needed to direct the laser beam through.
To make task more interesting, we create smoke/fog in the hallway, which makes light visible to their eyes. We ask students about the reason behind this drastic change in visibility of the laser light and introduce them scattering principle, where light scatters more by the particles in the smoke, makes it visible to us.
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Luis José and me had the chance to attend the OSA Leadership meeting in Tucson, Arizona last October 2014.
We got to interact with many leaders of chapters around the world and guess what…
Our activities and initiatives are as good as the best chapters!
During the leadership meetings we got inputs on how to write good projects to get the funding and all the tools that OSA provides to help with this task.
On 19th of february we invited Achim Woessner to give a Seminar on Plasmonics with Graphene.
Abstract
In this work we investigate plasmons in high-quality graphene boron nitride heterostructures. We find unprecedented low damping and strong field confinement of graphene plasmons and identify and characterize the main damping mechanisms in these heterostructures.
Graphene plasmonics provides an excellent new platform for strong optical field confinement with relatively low damping. This enables new device classes for deep subwavelength metamaterials, single-photon nonlinearities, extraordinarily strong light-matter interactions and nano-optoelectronic switches.
We show results where we exploit scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscopy to image propagating plasmons in such high quality graphene devices encapsulated between boron nitride. Frequency dispersion and particularly plasmon damping in real space is determined and we show that these high quality graphene samples show unprecedented low graphene plasmon damping combined with extremely strong field confinement. We identify the main damping channels to be intrinsic thermal phonons in the graphene as well as dielectric losses in the h-BN. The low obtained damping as well as the theoretical understanding of the damping mechanisms are the key for the development of graphene nano-photonic and nano-optoelectronic devices.
