The engineers that time forgot

You and I, dear reader of IEEE Microwave Magazine, are set to become more valuable day by day. Let me see if I can paint a picture of why

A letter to the editor

The goal of this letter is to point out that the fastest way to weaken any society and its business model, including the IEEE and its reader-pays stance, is to lose your professional integrity

From discussion leader to consumer guide: A century of theater criticism in Chicago newspapers

This article completes a three-part examination of theater critics working for Chicago newspapers during the twentieth century. The first article in the series covered the boomtown period leading up to World War I, and the second article addressed Chicago\u27s rise after 1960 as a regional center for theater covered by fewer newspapers and fewer critics. This article reviews those periods but emphasizes the middle, road town period, which saw a gradually dwindling band of critics functioning as quality control experts, passing judgment on New York road shows. After examining that period, this article uses commodification to consider the changing role of the critic over the entire century. It concludes that while commodification is a useful concept to understand vast changes in the critical landscape, it is neither an irresistible nor an inevitable force

Hybrid Electro-Optically Modulated Microcombs

Optical frequency combs based on mode-locked lasers have proven to be invaluable tools for a wide range of applications in precision spectroscopy and metrology. A novel principle of optical frequency comb generation in whispering-gallery mode microresonators ("microcombs") has been developed recently, which represents a promising route towards chip-level integration and out-of-the-lab use of these devices. Presently, two families of microcombs have been demonstrated: combs with electronically detectable mode spacing that can be directly stabilized, and broadband combs with up to octave-spanning spectra but mode spacings beyond electronic detection limits. However, it has not yet been possible to achieve these two key requirements simultaneously, as will be critical for most microcomb applications. Here we present a key step to overcome this problem by interleaving an electro-optic comb with the spectrum from a parametric microcomb. This allows, for the first time, direct control and stabilization of a microcomb spectrum with large mode spacing (>140 GHz) with no need for an additional mode-locked laser frequency comb. The attained residual 1-second-instability of the microcomb comb spacing is 10^-15, with a microwave reference limited absolute instability of 10^-12 at a 140 GHz mode spacing.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures; accepted for publication in Physical Review Letter