|
|
 On the 30th and 31st of October, Merchiston held its annual Prestige
Physics
lecture. This year the lecture, was given by Dr Brown, Assistant Programme
Director,
Ultrafast Photonics Collaboration, from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the university of St Andrews. He
spoke
on the development and use of femtosecond lasers. These are lasers with
exceptionally
short pulse width (x10^-15 seconds!) that are being developed for use in a wide range of applications from practical
genetic
engineering to ultra fast data links. To illistrate how short this is, one
femtosecond
is to a second what a second is to 32 million years. Not only can femtosecond pulses be controlled in
time, rather
like the Morse code of the electric telegraph, but the wide variety of
colours
making up such pulses offers the opportunity to encode vast amounts of information. The lecture was very engaging
through
the use of interactive questions and a wide array of demonstrations,
followed at
the end by a short question session.
|
