The second day at FiO turned busy and occupying. So busy that at the end of the day, I had to crash in the bed. This blog is therefore coming little late.
Bob has provided great near-live update of the plenary talks. The plenaries were really fascinating and enthusiasm of plenary speakers really palpable. Prof. Andrea Ghez made one of the best presentation I have ever seen and I hope to emulate her in future. The slides didn’t have more than 5 lines of text and a single graphic, which kept audience focused on what she was saying. I learned for the first time that there is likely a black hole at the center of every galaxy and its region of influence is called Schwarzchild radius. It is the radius below which a given amount of mass will collapse under the influence of gravity. It was fascinating to learn that the earth’s Schwarzchild radius is of the order of sugar cube and of the sun is of the order of a small university campus. However, I didn’t follow the notion that some galaxies have active nuclei that emit enormous jets of gas from their centers. If there is a black-hole at the center, how does that gas escape? Perhaps this gas escapes while whirling around the black hole at the edge of the Schwarzchild region. These ideas were followed by a discussion about the development of adaptive optics and impressive improvements that it provides when imaging stars.
Dr. Janos Kirz started from the origins of X-ray microscopy and brought the audience up to date with the state of the art. In effect, he summarized the key developments of the whole field in half an hour! It was curious to know that the refractive index of some materials at X-ray wavelengths is less than 1 and hence one can have total external reflection – a situation that I think does not exist (yet) in optical regime. He described idea of lens-less imaging in very intuitive terms. Basically, a lens can be thought of as returning us an object from the diffraction pattern. But if one records a diffraction pattern, the object can be retrieved by computation – bypassing practical issues of making a lens in X-ray regime.
Afterward, I attended sessions related to biomedical optics at Glen Ellen and gave a talk (about phase-space models for partially coherent systems) in the later half of the afternoon. All talks were interesting and some were really informative. It was great to see how non-linear optical method of CARS is giving molecular information without the need of labels. Several presentations were about design, implementation and application of new microscopic contrast mechanisms. I felt my presentation was well received and I could convey the big picture. But perhaps I put forward too many details. I felt so because some in the audience asked me to send more information rather than asking questions themselves. I hope to do better at my next talk on Wednesday.
The day ended with a relaxing time at O’ Flaherty’s pub – the venue of OSA student member reception. It was great meeting friends from all over the world and sharing their experiences. As I said earlier, I had to crash in the bed at the end.
Posted by Shalin Mehta 
