“Supposing that truth is a woman, what then?” The Lie Detector, The Love Machine and the Logic of Fantasy

One of the consequences of the public outcry over the 1929 St Valentine’s Day massacre was the establishment of a Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory at Northwestern University. The photogenic “Lie Detector Man”, Leonarde Keeler, was the Laboratory’s poster boy and his instrument the jewel in the crown of forensic science. The press often depicted Keeler gazing at a female suspect attached to his “sweat box”; a galvanometer electrode in her hand, a sphygmomanometer cuff on her arm and a rubber pneumograph tube strapped across her breasts. Keeler’s fascination with the deceptive charms of the female body was one he shared with his fellow lie detector pioneers, all of whom met their wives – and in William Marston’s case his mistress too – through their engagement with the instrument. Marston employed his own “Love Meter”, as the press dubbed it, to prove that “brunettes react far more violently to amatory stimuli than blondes”. In this paper I draw on the psychoanalytic concepts of fantasy and pleasure to argue that the female body played a pivotal role in establishing the lie detector’s reputation as an infallible and benign mechanical technology of truth

High power tunable femtosecond soliton source using hollow-core photonic bandgap fiber, and its use for frequency doubling

International audienc

Tunable high energy femtosecond fiber laser based on soliton formation in hollow-core photonic bandgap fiber

International audienc

2.6 mJ energy and 81 GW peak power femtosecond laser-pulse delivery and spectral broadening in inhibited coupling Kagome fiber

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Towards a plasma-core PCF for tunable UV-DUV radiation

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Side-hole Fiber . Based Bragg Grating for Simultaneous Measurement of Strain and Temperature

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Controlled chemical solution deposition of functional ceramics inside the core of glass fibers

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Iodine vapor photonic microcell

International audienceWe report on an optical fiber based iodine vapor spectroscopy cell. The formed photonic microcell (PMC) is a standalone FC/APC connectorized Iodine filled hollow core photonic crystal fiber (HCPCF) demonstrating transmission efficiency as high as 75% (1.2 dB insertion loss) and an absorption contrast reaching 70% on the P(33) 6-3 transition (i.e. ~633 nm wavelength) at room temperature. Iodine exhibits an astounding amount of transitions on the green-red spectral range. Hence, as a demonstration of its application as a frequency reference, we have generated many sub-Doppler spectral transparencies over the 631-635 range using saturated absorption spectroscopy for laser frequency stabilization

Toward power scaling in an acetylene mid-infrared hollow-core optical ber gas laser: effects of pressure, ber length, and pump power

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Near diffraction-limited performance of an OPA pumped acetylene-filled hollow-core fiber laser in the mid-IR

We investigate the mid-IR laser beam characteristics from an acetylene-filled hollow-core optical fiber gas laser (HOFGLAS) system. The laser exhibits near-diffraction limited beam quality in the 3 μm region with M2 = 1.15 ± 0.02 measured at high pulse energy, and the highest mid-IR pulse energy from a HOFGLAS system of 1.4 μJ is reported. Furthermore, the effects of output saturation with pump pulse energy are reduced through the use of longer fibers with low loss. Finally, the slope efficiency is shown to be nearly independent of gas pressure over a wide range, which is encouraging for further output power increase