November 17, 2005 Time Capsule

On November 17, 2005, when computers did not work as well as they do today, Bush was serving his second term and I was a youngster of 47, I stumbled across the time capsule portal on the Forbes website and wrote myself a letter from that simpler time.  Here is what it said:

Today is the day before my new Megrez Triplet Fluorite refracting telescope arrives.  I am so looking forward to getting it.  Both our children are doing well in college, our careers are successful (but hectic) and the sun is out on this almost-freezing beautiful November morning.

I just had my "optical cantilever" paper accepted by JOSA B, I corrected the proofs of my new PRA paper on the dipole free SOS expression, and I am anxiously awaiting word from PRL about the "ultimate limit" paper.  In the meantime, I am working on the symmetry paper with David Watkins.  All this while teaching two classes and doing lots of service - not to mention my debate with Bob Olson on religion.  Gotta run to a staff lunch. Oh yeh, and I scored 3 goals and had one assist in my ice hockey game two nights ago!  --Mark

It is interesting to see how some things have changed and others have stayed the same.

I still play hockey and coincidentally scored three goals in my last game.

But, my telescopes have been gathering dust.  I was into telescopes at that time and the Megrez is truly an exceptional instrument.  I enjoyed it for many outings and for a while I stored it on our upper deck, which towers above our neighborhood; well, that is, until I got a frantic call from a neighbor that the tarp was acting as a parachute and the telescope was hovering over our roof.  Given that my memory of those times is fading, perhaps it was a different telescope.  But I can state with emphatic certainty that this beautiful piece of art graces our study today and I still enjoy its elegance.  Some of the photos of the heavens that I took at that time can be found on my website at http://nlosource.com/Astro/Saturn2003-12-06.htm.

The PRL paper was rejected, but I found a good home for it in the still-respectable Physical Review A.  The other papers appeared and have done well, especially the dipole-free paper, which has been used extensively since then to take our work to the next level.  What I didn’t mention was that I was sitting in on a class on general relativity and traveled to Australia for the first time to attend a conference in Sydney.  The famous opera house was truly majestic from a distance, but up close its curved walls of white tiles was dirty as a frat house shower.  Though I spent an afternoon walking around town, visiting the government buildings and the gardens, I spent most of my time at the conference and evenings working on my general relativity homework.

What impresses me most about this window into the past is my efficiency, doing so much with so little time.  Now that I have more time, I spend too much of it trying to get everything just right.  Yesterday, I was telling a student that being on a teaching assistantship might take time away from research, but it makes you more efficient – and I was right.  The lesson from my past self is to take on more and worry less about being perfect.  I also need to remain passionate and engrossed in my activities, like working on our cabin in the wilderness.

All right, here I go…    

New Physical Review Letters Paper is out

Researchers at Washington State University use Patterns to set Limits on Light/Matter Interactions

 

Physicists Rick Lytel, Sean Mossman, Ethan Crowell and Mark Kuzyk at Washington State University are developing general principles that can be applied to making new materials that harness light.   Beefed up light-matter interactions can be used to make higher-contrast medical images, more effectively burn cancer cells while leaving healthy ones intact, suppress the twinkle of stars in telescopes, supercharge the internet, make lasers more colorful and effortlessly process complex images.  The new has appeared in the August 18^th 2017 issue of Physical Review Letters.

Researchers typically model each new candidate material with complex equations that are difficult to interpret.  Rather than evaluate specific materials using this obtuse formalism, the WSU team instead studies the structure of the equations to search for patterns that hint at the largest possible response.  Since the equations are intractable, the researchers instead throw metaphoric darts at the target, but constrain the trajectories using the sum rules -- physical laws that must be obeyed by a quantum system.  After many throws, and applying a filter that takes into account the effect of molecule size, a pattern comes into focus.

The pattern reveals the true fundamental limits to be about 30% lower than previously calculated and suggests that a potentially new design paradigm will be required to get to the limit.  Ongoing work is aimed at translating the physicists’ esoteric findings into rules that can be used by chemists, materials scientists and nanotechnologists to make better materials.

The present work resolves several puzzles.  The theory of the fundamental limits of light/matter interaction strength predicted a ceiling that was almost 50% higher than all theoretical models, suggesting that exotic materials were needed to bridge the gap.  The new work shows that such unphysical quantum systems are not required to reach the limits and that exotic systems will likely obey the same limit.  Furthermore, infinities in the older incomplete theory – warning flags in physics of theoretical pathologies -- have been excluded by the new results.

While the present work has practical implications for new technologies, the search for patterns generated by constrained random sampling is a powerful tool that can be applied to understanding the underlying structure of complex theories.  In future work, the WSU researchers plan to apply this approach to a holistic investigation of the combined properties of a material needed for specific applications, and identifying the path for getting there.