Duke Physics News

Earlier this month Profs. Albert Chang and Haiyan Gao attended an extremely successful conference, the 7th Joint Meeting of Chinese Physicists Worldwide – International Conference on Physics Education and Frontier Physics.

At the last plenary session on Education where Prof. Chang spoke, more than fifty high school students attended his very interesting and interactive lecture. The education program of this conference series has become more and more successful each year and Prof. Chang is the leader and originator of this highly successful program.

The overall Education program featured four plenary speakers, and a one and a half hour long Round Table Discussion. The discussion panel consisted of eight leading physics educators and included several of the plenary speakers as participants. The scope of the plenary talks and the round table discussion focused on new methodologies to measure students’ ability to reason and to draw conclusions based on acquired scientific knowledge, new and effective pedagogical methods, new tools for creating physics applets, as well as changes in educational systems to foster creativity.

View more photos from the conference on Flickr here.

Prof. Daniel Gauthier was the General Co-Chair of the recent topical meeting of the Optical Society of America, Nonlinear Optics 2011 (NLO 2011), following his term at conference Program Co-Chair in 2009. The conference is usually held every two years on one of the islands of Hawai’i, where the 2011 meeting was the 10th time that it was held here. The location is ideal for fostering interactions, especially between scientists from the United States and the Pacific Rim countries. One highlight of the meeting was a special Symposium celebrating the 50th anniversary of nonlinear optics. In particular, the first observation of a nonlinear optical effect – second harmonic generation of a laser beam passing through a quartz crystal – was reported by Peter Franken and colleagues in Physical Review Letters in 1961. The Symposium brought together luminaries of the field of nonlinear optics, many of whom were deeply influenced by the Franken paper and who contributed substantially to the rapid development of this field. The Symposium speakers shared personal anecdotes of their early research in nonlinear optics as well as describing some of their recent work and vision for the future of the field. The conference remains very active with a record number of contributed submissions this year and a program including over 170 plenary, invited, and contributed presentations over five days. The conference banquet is a traditional Luau, where Prof. Gauthier enjoyed some time with his better half and the conference participants. Prof. Gauthier also enjoyed some vacation time before and after the conference, including taking hikes in the mountains of Kaua’i and snorkeling with sea turtles.

Caption: Conference Chairs and speakers of the Symposium Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Nonlinear Optics, Nonlinear Optics 2011 (NLO 2011), Marriot Kauai Beach Resort, Lihue, Kaua'i, Hawai'i, July 20, 2011. From left to right: Prof. Y. Ron Shen, UC Berkely, Prof. Gerard Mourou, Ecole Polytechnique, France, Prof. Steven Cundiff, JILA/U. Colorado and NIST, NLO 2011 Program Co-Chair, Prof. Nicolaas Bloembergen, U. Arizona, Prof. Daniel Gauthier, Duke University, NLO 2011 General Co-Chair, Prof. Steve Harris, Stanford U., Prof. Benoit Boulanger, U. de Grenoble, NLO 2011 Program Co-Chair, Prof. Amnon Yariv, Caltech, Prof. Robert Byer, Stanford U., Prof. Takunori Taira, Inst. Molecular Science, NLO 2011 General Co-Chair. | Photo credit: Chad Stark, OSA Staff