50th anniversary of the laser

On July, 7, 1960 a press conference at Huyghes announced that Maiman had assembled and put into operation the first laser. It was the very pulsed ruby laser that everybody knows today. The announcement came as a bomb. Nobody expected that in an unknown laboratory, new to the race to build a laser, this result could be obtained. It was such an unexpected result that many still today mantain that the true laser was discovered at Bell by Shawlow. This result was achieved through a long story which passed by the Townes maser and many tentative experiments and discussions both in the USA and Soviet Union. In this special issue we present a collection of papers which provide further information as to what happened after Einstein introduced the concept of stimulated emission. The first paper is a short paper by Townes on the development of the physics of microwaves following the creation of the maser. When the laser came on the stage one of its properties was the inherent coherence of the emitted light. Emil Wolf's contribution enlights the early days of coherence to which he so much contributed and the very timely first Rochester Conference which was held on June 27-29, 1960 a few days before the Times announcement of the Maiman achievement. Important contributions were given by Soviet Scientists and, Svetlana Lukishova's contributions helps us understand the work of Valentin Fabrikant which was mostly unknown to western scientists. At the end of his life, Maiman went to Vancouver in Canada and Andrew H. Rawicz gives his testimoniancy of his friendship there. Coherence and the statistical properties of laser light were much studied and we have two exceptional papers by Roy Pike and Jan Perina discussing these arguments. The issue also contains three more papers presenting some earlier achievements in the construction of multiquantumwell laser (M. L. Dotor, P. Huertas, P. A. Postigo, D. Golmayo and F. Briones), the first measurements on very short pulses (H. P. Weber and R. Dandliker) and spatial coherence (D. P. Barato and M. L. Calvo)

Management of the orbital angular momentum of vortex beams in a quadratic nonlinear interaction

Light intensity control of the orbital angular momentum of the fundamental beam in a quadratic nonlinear process is theoretically and numerically presented. In particular we analyzed a seeded second harmonic generation process in presence of orbital angular momentum of the interacting beams due both to on axis and off axis optical vortices. Examples are proposed and discussed

Random nonlinear layered structures as sources of photon pairs for quantum-information processing

Random nonlinear layered structures have been found to be a useful source of photon pairs with perfectly indistinguishable un-entangled photons emitted into a very narrow spectral range. Localization of the interacting optical fields typical for random structures gives relatively high photon-pair fluxes. Superposing photon-pair emission quantum paths at different emission angles, several kinds of two-photon states (including states with coincident frequencies) useful in quantum-information processing can easily be generated.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Influence of pump-field scattering to nonclassical-light generation in a photonic band-gap nonlinear planar waveguide

Optical parametric process occurring in a nonlinear planar waveguide can serve as a source of light with nonclassical properties. Properties of the generated fields are substantially modified by scattering of the nonlinearly interacting fields in a photonic band-gap structure inside the waveguide. A quantum model of linear operator amplitude corrections to amplitude mean-values provides conditions for an efficient squeezed-light generation as well as generation of light with sub-Poissonian photon-number statistics. Destructive influence of phase mismatch of the nonlinear interaction can fully be compensated using a suitable photonic-band gap structure inside the waveguide. Also an increase of signal-to-noise ratio of an incident optical field can be reached in the waveguide.Comment: 10 pages, 12 figure

A note on the history of photoacoustic, thermal lensing, and photothermal deflection techniques

We review the history of photoacoustic, thermal lensing, and photothermal deflection techniques from early experiments to the current time. The paper also describes the main fields of application in chronological order, showing the primary advantages and listing initial technological development

Modeling the effects of variable feeding patterns of larval ticks on the transmission of Borrelia lusitaniae and Borrelia afzelii

Spirochetes belonging to the Borrelia burgdoferi sensu lato (sl) group cause Lyme Borreliosis (LB), which is the most commonly reported vector-borne zoonosis in Europe. B. burgdorferi sl is maintained in nature in a complex cycle involving Ixodes ricinus ticks and several species of vertebrate hosts. The transmission dynamics of B. burgdorferi sl is complicated by the varying competence of animals for different genospecies of spirochetes that, in turn, vary in their capability of causing disease. In this study, a set of difference equations simplifying the complex interaction between vectors and their hosts (competent and not for Borrelia) is built to gain insights into conditions underlying the dominance of B. lusitaniae (transmitted by lizards to susceptible ticks) and the maintenance of B. afzelii (transmitted by wild rodents) observed in a study area in Tuscany, Italy. Findings, in agreement with field observations, highlight the existence of a threshold for the fraction of larvae feeding on rodents below which the persistence of B. afzelii is not possible. Furthermore, thresholds change as nonlinear functions of the expected number of nymph bites on mice, and the transmission and recovery probabilities. In conclusion, our model provided an insight into mechanisms underlying the relative frequency of different Borrelia genospecies, as observed in field studies.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, to be published in Theoretical Population Biolog

Optimization of thermochromic VO2 based structures with tunable thermal emissivity

In this paper, we design and simulate VO2/metal multilayers to obtain a large tunability of the thermal emissivity of infrared (IR) filters in the typical mid wave IR window of many infrared cameras. The multilayer structure is optimized to realise a low emissivity filter at high temperatures useful for military purposes. The values of tunability found for VO2/metal multilayers are larger than the value for a single thick layer of VO2. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4739489

Light scattering from a rough metal surface: theory and experiment

There is still great interest in the determination of microtopographic properties of rough metallic surfaces from light scattering measurements. According to Beckmann–Kirchhoff theory a clear relationship is established between the in-plane angular scattered light intensity and the statistical properties of the surface. We discuss one way to invert this relationship, and we introduce a new iterative procedure to retrieve the height autocorrelation function even for a very rough metallic surface (rms surface roughness of the same order of the optical wavelength). The procedure is eventually applied to the experimental data of a known metallic surface for validation

Properties of entangled photon pairs generated in one-dimensional nonlinear photonic-band-gap structures

We have developed a rigorous quantum model of spontaneous parametric down-conversion in a nonlinear 1D photonic-band-gap structure based upon expansion of the field into monochromatic plane waves. The model provides a two-photon amplitude of a created photon pair. The spectra of the signal and idler fields, their intensity profiles in the time domain, as well as the coincidence-count interference pattern in a Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer are determined both for cw and pulsed pumping regimes in terms of the two-photon amplitude. A broad range of parameters characterizing the emitted down-converted fields can be used. As an example, a structure composed of 49 layers of GaN/AlN is analyzed as a suitable source of photon pairs having high efficiency.Comment: 14 pages, 23 figure