“‘Relentless Geography’: Los Angeles’ Imagined Cartographies in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange,”

What would a map of Los Angeles drawn from the ground up look like? In his groundbreaking work The Production of Space (1974), Henri Lefebvre argues that the conceived space of urban planners is fundamentally distinct from lived space, which cannot be mapped out. In her impressive city-wide narrative, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997) demonstrates the effects of imposing conceived space upon the lived space of inner city Los Angeles residents, and what happens when the counter-model of space being lived by a city’s inhabitants rebels. Yamashita’s text mirrors this disjuncture between represented and lived space through the use of narrative surrealism. Space is magically reconfigured in the city, shrinking the uninhabited Downtown and expanding over-populated yet underrepresented neighborhoods, literally shifting geographically until its mapping matches the social space of those on the ground rather than those who map it from above. Literary criticism on the novel to date has largely interpreted Tropic of Orange as a commentary on the effects of globalization; not enough attention has been paid to the novel’s surreal expansion of Los Angeles’ inner city. Using Lefebvre’s “science of space,” anchored by Los Angeles’ city planning schemas, I argue that Yamashita offers a different map, one perceived by the subsets of LA’s population that fall through the cracks of the city’s grid. Tropic of Orange’s unorthodox formal structure, when combined with its narrative surrealism, creates a differential space in the text, transforming the novel into the Los Angeles imagined by its anonymous users

Sub-kHz-level relative stabilization of an intracavity doubled continuous wave optical parametric oscillator using Pound-Drever-Hall scheme

We report the relative frequency stabilization of an intracavity frequency doubled singly resonant optical parametric oscillator on a Fabry-Perot\'etalon. The red/orange radiation produced by the frequency doubling of the intracavity resonant idler is stabilized using the Pound-Drever-Hall locking technique. The relative frequency noise of this orange light, when integrated from 1 Hz to 50 kHz, corresponds to a standard deviation of 700 Hz. The frequency noise of the pump laser is shown experimentally to be transferred to the non resonant signal beam

Multi-wavelength, all-solid-state, continuous wave mode locked picosecond Raman laser

We demonstrate the operation of a cascaded continuous wave (CW) mode-locked Raman oscillator. The output pulses were compressed from 28 ps at 532 nm down to 6.5 ps at 559 nm (first Stokes) and 5.5 ps at 589 nm (second Stokes). The maximum output was 2.5 W at 559 nm and 1.4 W at 589 nm with slope efficiencies up to 52%. This technique allows simple and efficient generation of short-pulse radiation to the cascaded Stokes wavelengths, extending the mode-locked operation of Raman lasers to a wider range of visible wavelengths between 500 - 650 nm based on standard inexpensive picosecond Nd:YAG oscillators

Improved surface quality of anisotropically etched silicon {111} planes for mm-scale integrated optics

We have studied the surface quality of millimeter-scale optical mirrors produced by etching CZ and FZ silicon wafers in potassium hydroxide to expose the $\{111\}$ planes. We find that the FZ surfaces have four times lower noise power at spatial frequencies up to $500\, {mm}^{-1}$. We conclude that mirrors made using FZ wafers have higher optical quality

Frequency stabilization at the kilohertz level of a continuous intracavity frequency-doubled singly resonant optical parametric oscillator

A continuous intracavity frequency-doubled singly resonant optical parametric oscillator (OPO) is stabilized to the side of the transmission peak of a medium finesse Fabry–Perot cavity. The narrow bandwidth of the frequency noise of this OPO allows this simple scheme to lead to a stability of a few kilohertz with respect to the locking etalon. The system, operating in the visible domain, remains locked for more than 1h

Cascaded Nondegenerate Four-Wave Mixing Technique for High-Power Single-Cycle Pulse Synthesis in the Visible and Ultraviolet Ranges

We present a new technique to synthesize high-power single-cycle pulses in the visible and ultraviolet ranges by coherent superposition of a multiband octave-spanning spectrum obtained by highly-nondegenerate cascaded four-wave mixing of femtosecond pulses in bulk isotropic nonresonant media. The generation of coherent spectra spanning over two octaves in bandwidth is experimentally demonstrated using a thin fused silica slide. Full characterization of the intervening multicolored fields using frequency-resolved optical gating, where multiple cascaded orders have been measured simultaneously for the first time, supports the possibility of direct synthesis of near-single-cycle 2.2 fs visible-UV pulses without recurring to complex amplitude or phase control, which should enable many applications in science and technology.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures. Submitted to Physical Review

Sub-10 fs pulses tunable from 480 to 980 nm from a NOPA pumped by a Yb:KGW source

We describe two noncollinear optical parametric amplifier (NOPA) systems pumped by either the second (515 nm) or the third (343 nm) harmonic of an Yb:KGW amplifier, respectively. Pulse durations as short as 6.8 fs are readily obtained by compression with commercially available chirped mirrors. The availability of both second and third harmonic for NOPA pumping allows for gap-free tuning from 520 to 980 nm. The use of an intermediate NOPA to generate seed light at 780 nm extends the tuning range of the third-harmonic pumped NOPA towards 450 nm