1994 Fall Meeting Combines Excitement Over Research Advancements with Concern Over Future Direction
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d Hecker, director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, gives the plenary presentation, 'The Cold War is OverWhatNow?"
reusable products; and, in the future, keep track of "where every atom went" in an industrial process. "This is one of the few things you can do that your kids will be proud of you for," Laudise told listeners. The Society's mission to promote interdisciplinary, goal-oriented research found expression in the dizzying variety of technical work discussed at the meeting. In Symposium Za, Optical Waveguide Materials, E. Ozbay of Iowa State University showed that Lincoln-log-like structures of layered photonic bandgap (PBG) crystals are opaque to electromagnetic radiation over a useful band of frequencies from 100 to 500 GHz. Adding or removing dielectric material from each crystal layer creates defects that finely "tune" the frequencies falling into the gaps, Ozbay said. The next generation of such devices, he predicted, will have bandgaps in the optical range, making them useful components in a range of active photonic devices. Protecting sensitive detecting equipment—including the human eye—from the damaging effects of high-intensity laser light was the focus of a series of presentations during Symposium Zb, Materials for Optical Limiting. James
Shirk of the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), for example, demonstrated that the molecular structures of organic materials like phthalocyanines assume nonlinear absorption properties when doped with heavy metals. Altered phthalocyanine films become more opaque to laser light at higher energies and longer exposure times, Shirk explained, making them attractive as "fail-safe" protection devices. Shirk's NRL colleague Art Snow later presented measurements of optically clear phthalocyanine glasses synthesized through a combination of hydrogen bonding, stereochemical interactions, and symmetry changes at the periphery of the phthalocyanine rings. In Symposium W2, Hollow and Solid Spheres and Microspheres, University of Illinois graduate student Mike Wong presented results of recent experiments using ultrasound to create durable, oxygen-rich hemoglobin microbubbles (Figure 1) that may eventually be mass-produced as a substitute for human blood. (See "Awards" description of the MRS Medal Award lecture given by Wong's faculty advisor Kenneth Suslick, who was recog-
Figure 1. Ultrasound is used to create hemoglobin microbubbles.
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1994 Fall Meeting
Figure 2. An example of extreme morphological instability during the combustion growth of diamond on a square diamond substrate. The vertical mark on the left-hand side is 100 ym. Note the unstable, uncontrolled growth of diamond blades on the upper edge of the original square substrate. These bladeshaped crystals grew directly into the direction of the incident
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