Fortnightly What’s On Newsletter | 19th Apr 2021 Dear Chapter members, alumni, and friends, Here is our first newsletter email, and we are delighted to announce several upcoming events. First of all, there is the talk by Prof. Kishan Dholakia happening this Friday. Do not miss it out! You still have an option to RSVP by 2 pm today to a Social Dinner with Prof. Kishan Dholakia which takes place on Thursday. The International Day of Light is approaching: many activities are organised to celebrate this day. You can find more information below. If you have any suggestions, questions, or feedback, you are very welcome to contact us directly or via a Microsoft form. Stay tuned, and have a great week ahead! Liza and Marcus, Presidents/Vice-Presidents OSA & SPIE Student Chapter Australian National University ANNOUNCEMENTS This Friday, Prof. Kishan Dholakia from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK, is giving a talk in Huxley Lecture Theatre. A Zoom-streaming will be available via the link or using the meeting’s ID 5518753238 and password 30624700. Prof. Kishan Dholakia will give an overview of his group’s work, including optical trapping, beam shaping and metrology. He will then focus on the methods for shaping light for biomedical applications. It will include the use of propagation invariant beams, multiphoton approaches and the use of deep learning. The event is sponsored by TMOS, ARC Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems, and our student chapter. There will be a Social Dinner with Prof. Dholakia at 6:30 pm on Thursday, 22 April. The dinner is happening at the Indian Accent; we are splitting the bill. Please let Marcus know by 2 pm today (Monday) if you are coming and have not RSVP’ed yet. The International Day of Light (IDL) is approaching. It is held on May 16th every year, the anniversary of the first successful operation of the laser in 1960 by physicist and engineer Theodore Maiman. IDL is a global initiative that provides an annual focal point for the continued appreciation of light and the role it plays in science, culture and art, education, and in fields as diverse as medicine, communications, and energy. The broad theme of light will allow many different sectors of society worldwide to participate in activities that demonstrate how science, technology, art and culture can help achieve the goals of UNESCO – education, equality, and peace. An event programme can be found on the IDL official website. You can tag your posts or images related to the IDL by the #LightDay2021 hashtag. The SPIE Annual International Day of Light Photo Contest aims to raise awareness about IDL and the vital role that light and light-based technologies play in daily life. The 2021 contest opens on IDL, 16 May 2021. Amateur and professional photographers alike submit photos for a chance to win US$2,500. You can have a look at the winning images of the 2020 contest. Thank you for expressing your interest in attending the Photonics Industry Event organised by Katie Chong from Baraja and Sarah Lau from Finisar in Sydney on Friday, 21 May. We have reached the cap of attendees from our ANU chapter! If you have RSVP’ed but cannot attend, please let Marcus or Liza know as soon as possible. If you have not RSVP’ed yet but want to attend, you can be added to a waiting list. We are trying our best to get a larger number of attendees approved by the organisers.

Fortnightly What’s On Newsletter | 10th May 2021 Dear Chapter members, alumni, and friends, Thank you for attending the Social Dinner with Prof. Kishan Dholakia as well as his wonderful talk Shaping the Future of Biomedical Imaging. There is a featured photo of the first 2021 in-person school-wide seminar at the RSPhys above. The event was sponsored by TMOS, ARC Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems, and our student chapter. We are delighted to announce several upcoming events attributed to The International Day of Light here, in our second newsletter email. First of all, we are going to have a Movie & Pizza Night this Friday, do not miss it out. Secondly, you can support our Chapter members who participate in TMOS Photo Competition, vote for them on Twitter. Thirdly, we are looking for judges for the annual Student Talk Competition within the Optical Physics course, express your interest. Fourthly, we are going to run a Series of Interviews with our Chapter members about their research. Please find more information below. Last but not least, we are pleased to announce that Professor Dragomir Neshev, Director of TMOS, kindly agreed to become a co-advisor of our OSA Student Chapter! Stay tuned, have a great week ahead, and see most of you on Friday’s Movie Night, Liza and Marcus, Presidents/Vice-Presidents OSA & SPIE Student Chapter Australian National University ANNOUNCEMENTS This Friday, there is our first event of the Celebrate Diversity & Inclusion Series: Movie & Pizza Night at 5.30 pm in the Conference Room (Level 4, Physics South). The movie Radioactive (2019) is a 2019 British biographical drama film about Marie Curie (1867-1934) and her Nobel Prize-winning work that changed the world. IMDb 6.2/10. Please note that the room capacity can be limited. You can reserve your place by emailing to Marcus or Liza.   Three of our Chapter members participate in the Photo Competition organised by TMOS this year. They are Jingshi Yan, Marcus Cai, and Neuton Li. You can support them on Twitter, please check @MetaOptics account. Student Talk Competition is traditionally organised by the Chapter for Optical Physics course students. It will take place on Tuesday, 25 May, via Zoom, and will be followed by lab tours. The talks will be marked by PhD students from the OSA&SPIE Student Chapter and the experiment demonstrators of the course. We are looking for PhD students from the Chapter who would like to participating in marking the student talks. Judges are required to attend both online sessions: 11 am – 12.30 pm and 2.30 pm – 4 pm. Please express your interest by emailing to Liza by Monday, 23 May. Our Media Officer Anha is going to organise a Series of Interviews with the Chapter members about their research. If you are interested to be one of the first interviewee, you are welcome to send an email to Anha for more details. Thank you for expressing your interest in attending the Photonics Industry Event organised by Katie Chong from Baraja and Sarah Lau from Finisar in Sydney on Friday, 21 May. We have reached the cap of attendees from our ANU chapter! However, an online option for this event will be available for the talks and panel discussion, please register for the “online only” ticket if you wish to attend the event virtually. If you have any questions, please let Marcus or Liza know. The SPIE Annual International Day of Light Photo Contest aims to raise awareness about IDL and the vital role that light and light-based technologies play in daily life. The 2021 contest opens on IDL, 16 May 2021. Amateur and professional photographers alike submit photos for a chance to win US$2,500. You can have a look at the winning images of the 2020 contest. The International Day of Light (IDL) is approaching. It is held on May 16th every year, the anniversary of the first successful operation of the laser in 1960 by physicist and engineer Theodore Maiman. IDL is a global initiative that provides an annual focal point for the continued appreciation of light and the role it plays in science, culture and art, education, and in fields as diverse as medicine, communications, and energy. The broad theme of light will allow many different sectors of society worldwide to participate in activities that demonstrate how science, technology, art and culture can help achieve the goals of UNESCO – education, equality, and peace. An event programme can be found on the IDL official website. You can tag your posts or images related to the IDL by the #LightDay2021 hashtag.

Member recruit event and Student seminar

Firstly, please join us to congratulate Matthew Parry and Jingshi Yan. They are travelling to USA for SPIE and OSA conferences funded by student chapter. We appreciate your significant contribution with a small reward.

Our OSA-SPIE student chapter is gaining significant fame in Research School of Physics and Engineering. This chapter has organised several events under Photonics Vitality, such as workshops; outreach program; boot camp and seminars. These achievements are possible because of member’s involvement in the chapter. We hope to continue the good work and bring in more members. In regards, we had arranged member recruit event along with student seminar on 7^th of March at Department of Quantum Science. In pursuit of recruiting members, Shridhar Manjunath presented a brief introduction about our chapter activities and benefits.

As part of student seminar, Matthew Parry presented his works on Metasurfaces for quantum applications. He explains it as, “Metasurfaces – From beam steering to infrared vision and quantum states”. With his brilliant talk Matthew shared his research ideas with researchers of DQS. Hopefully this results in fruitful research collaborations for him. With this event, our chapter gained significant attention of students from DQS. Also, we provided lunch and drinks for all the attendees.

Reporting to you -Shridhar Manjunath

A World of Waves and Resonances: Nanophotonics Boot Camp

Welcome you all to 2019, hope you had good holidays.

Outreach program was one of the most highlighted event during last year. OSA-SPIE student chapter arranged multiple school outreach programs both in Canberra and rural Australia. We received grant from SPIE to conduct boot camp. The program was intended to invite school students to have hands on experience with optical components. The boot camp was conducted using National youth Science forum 2019 platform. There were two different boot camp sessions on 4th and 18th of Jan, around 50 students attended each session.

The boot camp was aimed to provide basic understanding of diffraction, interference and resonance. With the use of mini ripple tank and small presentation, we demonstrated basic properties of light. Later, students had hands on experience to use optical components to obtain interference and diffraction. Thanks to Andrew Papworth, we were able to build Fabry-Perot Interferometer to show resonance. This gave picture of frequency space and applications of resonance in real world.

As part of the boot camp they were invited to research labs, and to have a quick peek of what experimental research looks like. Hopefully, some of them embark on this research carrier. Many students said, they never had opportunity to learn light properties in practical.

“The joy in the student eyes are worth more than thousand words” – Shridhar Manjunath

Very good start to this year activities, let us keep the spirits up and continue on the good work from last year.

Photonics Vitality Workshop 2018

On the 7th of December the OSA and SPIE student chapters at the Australian National University (ANU) hosted a workshop on the latest advances in nonlinear and quantum photonics, titled “Photonics Vitality.”  The workshop was organised by the members of the student chapters with the encouragement of Professors Yuri Kivshar and Dragomir Neshev of the Research School of Physics and Engineering at ANU.  By taking advantage of the large number of international visitors to Australia at this time of year we were able to produce a workshop with talks by world leaders in the field of photonics.

The day began with a talk by Prof. Zhigang Chen of San Francisco State University in the USA & Nankai University in China on the topic of tunable optical nonlinearity in biological suspensions.  He was followed by ANU’s Prof. Yuri Kivshar who gave an overview of all-dielectric photonics with Mie-resonant nanostructures and metasurfaces. This was then followed by Prof. David Moss of Swinburne University in Australia talking about Microwave and RF applications of micro-combs, and then Dr. Alexander Poddubny from ANU spoke about nonlinear and topological photonics.

After morning tea the second session began with a description by Prof. Roberto Morandotti of INRS in Canada of integrated quantum frequency combs. ANU’s Assoc. Prof. Andrey Sukhorukov then discussed recent research on shaping and imaging quantum light with metasurfaces. Also from ANU, Dr. Rose Ahlefeldt spoke on the use of rare earth materials for microwave to optical conversion and PhD student Mr. Kai Wang explained the synthetic dimensions and frequency state reconstruction of spectral photonic lattices.

After lunch the third session began with Prof. Roland Schiek of OTH Regensburg in Germany who spoke about Akhmediev breathers in optical slab waveguides.
He was followed by Dr. Falk Eilenberger of Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany who discussed semiconducting 2D materials as a nano-sandbox for fundamental physics and a new platform for optical coatings, light emission and quantum light sources. Then, Dr. Alexander Solntsev of the University of Technology Sydney gave a talk on Sum-Frequency and Photon-Pair Generation in AlGaAs Nano-Disks. Also from the University of Technology Sydney, Dr. Sejeong Kim spoke on Hexagonal Boron Nitride Photonics. Finally, two PhD students from ANU, Mr. Tobias Vogl and Mr. Kirill Koshelev, gave talks on next-generation single-photon sources in 2D materials for satellite-based quantum communication and then meta optics and bound states in the continuum respectively.

The final session began with ANU’s Prof. Dragomir Neshev giving an overview of the field of biosensing with optical metasurfaces. Then Assoc. Prof.Aloyse Degiron of CNRS and Universite Paris Diderot in France spoke on optoelectronics of colloidal quantum dots hybridized with optical antennas. This was followed by Assoc. Prof. Andrey Miroshnichenko of the University of New South Wales in Australia speaking on lightning up silicon nanoparticles. Dr. Chengjun Zou of Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany then gave a talk about tunable optical dielectric metasurfaces which are  acilitated by the photoalignment of liquid crystals. Dr. Valerio Flavio Gili of Laboratoire MPQ at Universite Paris Diderot in France spoke about all-dielectric nanophotonics with AlGaAs-on-AlOx structures. The final talk for the workshop was given by Mr. Zelio Fusco  PhD student at ANU who spoke about nanostructured dielectric fractals on resonant  lasmonic metasurfaces for selective and sensitive optical sensing of volatile compounds.

After the talks the participants enjoyed a dinner of Turkish cuisine over which we discussed the many topics explored during the workshop.