PIERS 2015 Takuma Nagano

Research

2015 OSA (FIO/LS) Homecoming Report

Takuma Nagano, 1st year master's student

in Prague, Czech Republic, 06-09 July, 2015

1. Outline

I attended PIERS, Progress In Electromagnetics Research Symposium 2015 in Prague. The symposium is held every year alternately in Asia and Europe, and the 2015 symposium was held in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic. This was the first time for Tanabe Laboratory to participate in the symposium, which was held for the 36th time. Especially, the research reports related to electromagnetic waves were remarkable, and I had an impression that both theorists and experimentalists presented their research in good balance. The presentations were well balanced between theorists and experimentalists.

Fig. 1 Venue
Fig. 1 Venue

The conference was held in several conference rooms attached to the hotel shown in the above figure (TOP HOTEL). There were several relatively small lounges with a good atmosphere, and I exchanged greetings several times with a researcher in the biological sciences whom I met in the waiting room of the Nikola Tesla Airport in Belgrade, where I landed in transit on my way to the conference.

2. Own presentation

Poster presentations were mainly in the form of question-and-answer sessions during coffee breaks. Therefore, the questioners were more relaxed than in the usual oral presentations, and I was not so nervous, even though it was my first time to present at a conference. However, it was very difficult to communicate my research in English to researchers in different fields, and I felt keenly that my English skills were not good enough. I realized that, as is probably true of all presentations, if I did not actively appeal to the audience during the poster presentation, the presentation itself would not be possible because the audience would not be interested in the presentation in the first place. In addition to my language skills, I recognized my low analytical ability and lack of aggressiveness toward my own research as an issue to be addressed in the future. Finally, a young Russian female researcher who was giving a poster presentation on electromagnetic wave theory next to me answered questions and answered them in Russian from start to finish, which was very impressive.

3. Topic Introduction

As mentioned above, many of the presentations were related to electromagnetic waves, but there were also a fair number of presentations related to photonics. Among them, I was particularly interested in the work on soliton explosions by Antoine F. J. Runge et al. of the University of Auckland, which has already been published in a paper entitled "Observation of soliton explosions in a passively mode-locked ber laser. This has already been published in Optica under the title "Observation of soliton explosions in a passively mode-locked ber laser".

Soliton Explosions are phenomena that occur once every few pulses during the transition from a stable soliton state to an unstable soliton state. The theory is based on J. M. Soto-Crespo, N. Akhmediev, and A. Ankiewicz, "Pulsating, Creeping, and Erupting Solitons in Dissipative Systems," Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 2937 (2000). and experimentally published in S. T. Cundiff, J. M. Soto-Crespo, and N. Akhmediev, "Experimental Evidence for Soliton Explosions," Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 073903 (2002). This has been achieved only once with a Ti-Sapphire solid-state laser, as reported by Antoine et al. In this paper, Antoine et al. presented a theoretical study of these phenomena in the case of a Fiber Laser, followed by experimental observations.

Such phenomena are observed when there is Raman gain, and can be further divided into the following cases

  • (resonator length) < 50 m =) stable state only (due to insufficient Raman gain).
  • (resonator length) > 200 m =) unstable state only (due to too large Raman gain).

During the Q&A session, the question was asked, "What kind of applications do you have in mind? One of the audience members answered, "It could be used for random number generation. One of the audience members said, "It may be used for random number generation. One of the audience members said, "It could be used for random number generation.

4. Facility visit

On July 10, we visited HiLASE, a research facility located in the suburbs of Prague, guided by Mr. Miura, an alumnus of KANSEI Labs. HiLASE is a facility that conducts research mainly for industrial applications of high-power lasers and has received a large investment from the EU. The huge, well-controlled clean room was lined with various optical systems, and high-end equipment that I had only heard of was lined up here and there. I visited the facility just before I started constructing a 4-f waveform shaper, which increased my admiration and motivation for optics.

Figure 2 Appearance
Figure 2 Appearance

5. Afterword

First time in Europe, first time at a conference. It was a very exciting week. Although sales tax is high in Prague, food and especially beer are inexpensive, and yet very tasty. From the "King's Road" that runs through the tourist attractions from Prague Castle, the model for Kafka's "The Castle," I could see a very beautiful cityscape from the Middle Ages and beautiful Slavic women (they were really all beautiful women).

In Belgrade, where I was in transit on my outward trip, I toured the old city center, where the old railway lines had been built, and felt firsthand the desolation unique to socialism in Eastern Europe. Other than that, I went to a different hotel with the same name, got ripped off at a fruit stand, and spent 15 hours waiting at a facility outside the Abu Dhabi airport (transit) on the return trip... Looking back on it all, I have to admit that I had my fair share of problems, but basically I think I completed my work without incident. I think we were able to complete our work without incident. If there was one thing I felt strongly about, it was that I wanted to be able to use English freely.

Finally, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Mr. Chen for giving me the opportunity to have such a valuable experience and to Dr. Tanabe for his various supports in the field. Thank you very much.