2006

Femtosecond laser micromachining, at 1st International Workshop on Multiphoton Processes in Glass and Glassy Materials, University of Sydney (Sydney, Australia), Monday, December 11, 2006:
When femtosecond laser pulses are focused tightly into a transparent material, the intensity in the focal volume can become high enough to cause nonlinear absorption of laser energy. The absorption, in turn, can lead to permanent structural or chemical changes. Such changes can be used for micromachining bulk transparent materials. Applications include data storage and the writing of waveguides and waveguide splitters in bulk glass, fabrication of micromechanical devices in polymers, and subcellular photodisruption inside single cells.
Confessions of a converted lecturer, at Physics Colloquium, University of Sydney (Sydney, Australia), Monday, December 11, 2006:
I thought I was a good teacher until I discovered my students were just memorizing information rather than learning to understand the material. Who was to blame? The students? The material? I will explain how I came to the agonizing conclusion that the culprit was neither of these. It was my teaching that caused students to fail! I will show how I have adjusted my approach to teaching and how it has improved my students' performance significantly.
Wrapping light around a hair, at Centre of Excellence for Ultrahigh-bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems Seminar, University of Sydney (Sydney, Australia), Friday, December 8, 2006:
Can light be guided by a fiber whose diameter is much smaller than the wavelength of the light? Can we mold the flow of light on the micrometer scale so it wraps, say, around a hair? Until recently the answer to these questions was ‘no’. We developed a technique for drawing long, free-standing silica wires with diameters down to 50 nm that have a surface smoothness at the atomic level and a high uniformity of diameter. Light can be launched into these silica nanowires by optical evanescent coupling and the wires allow low-loss single-mode operation. They can be bent sharply, making it... Read more about Wrapping light around a hair
Stopping Time, at Australian Institute of Physics 17th Biennial Congress 2006, Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre (Brisbane, Queensland, Australia), Thursday, December 7, 2006:
Time is of philosophical interest as well as the subject of mathematical and scientific research. Even though it is a concept familiar to most, the passage of time remains one of the greatest enigmas of the universe. The philosopher Augustine once said: "What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know." The concept time indeed cannot be explained in simple terms. Emotions, life, and death - all are related to our interpretation of the irreversible flow of time. After a discussion of the concept of time, we will review... Read more about Stopping Time
Wrapping light around a hair, at Australian Institute of Physics 17th Biennial Congress 2006, Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre (Brisbane, Queensland, Australia), Tuesday, December 5, 2006:
Can light be guided by a fiber whose diameter is much smaller than the wavelength of the light? Can we mold the flow of light on the micrometer scale so it wraps, say, around a hair? Until recently the answer to these questions was ‘no’. We developed a technique for drawing long, free-standing silica wires with diameters down to 50 nm that have a surface smoothness at the atomic level and a high uniformity of diameter. Light can be launched into these silica nanowires by optical evanescent coupling and the wires allow low-loss single-mode operation. They can be bent sharply, making it... Read more about Wrapping light around a hair
Confessions of a converted lecturer, at Australian Institute of Physics 17th Biennial Congress 2006, Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre (Brisbane, Queensland, Australia), Monday, December 4, 2006:
I thought I was a good teacher until I discovered my students were just memorizing information rather than learning to understand the material. Who was to blame? The students? The material? I will explain how I came to the agonizing conclusion that the culprit was neither of these. It was my teaching that caused students to fail! I will show how I have adjusted my approach to teaching and how it has improved my students' performance significantly.
Three-dimensional microfabrication with conjugated polymers, at 2006 MRS Fall Meetng (Boston, MA, USA), Thursday, November 30, 2006:
In this work we present new resin formulations containing active components, that can be polymerized by two-photon absorption in order to fabricate microstructures. The host resin we used consists of tris(2-hydroxyethyl)isocyanurate triacrylate, which gives hardness to the polymeric structure, ethoxylated(6) trimethyl-lolpropane triacrylate, which assists in decreasing the structure shrinkage upon polymerization, and ethyl-2,4,6-trimethylbenzoylphenylphosphinate, which acts as the polymerization photoinitiator. As guest material we used the conjugated polymer MEH-PPV, whose interesting... Read more about Three-dimensional microfabrication with conjugated polymers
Two-photon engineered polymer scaffolds for 3D migration studies, at MRS Fall Conference 2006 (Cambridge, MA), Wednesday, November 29, 2006
In tissue engineering, control of ligand-receptor-mediated interaction between cell and material is an underlying principle for designing biomaterials. Microfabrication techniques such as soft lithography have enabled researchers to study cell behavior extensively in two dimensions (2D) by controlling the spatial distribution of ligands on a micrometer and sub-micrometer scale. However, lack of an appropriate three-dimensional (3D) microfabrication technique with micrometer resolution has prevented from presenting cell adhesion ligands in an organized fashion in 3D. Thus, fabricating such a... Read more about Two-photon engineered polymer scaffolds for 3D migration studies
Femtosecond laser micromachining in azopolymer films, at 2006 MRS Fall Meeting (Boston, MA, USA), Monday, November 27, 2006:
In this work, we investigated femtosecond laser micromachining in both poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) and PMMA doped with the azoaromatic compounds Disperse Red 1 (DR1) and Disperse Red 13 (DR13). These compounds are particularly interesting due to their linear and nonlinear optical properties.

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