Another paper accepted, but in record time

In a recent post, I mentioned a paper that took about 4 years to get published. In contrast, we did some work that took about 3 months to complete, and today, the manuscript was accepted for publication in JOSA B.

The topic:

Testing the diffusion hypothesis as a mechanism of self-healing in Disperse orange 11 doped in PMMA

This is an important piece of work that get's us one step closer to understanding self healing in dye-doped polymers, a phenomena that was discovered in our lab a decade ago. The first comment I always get when introducing our work at scientific meetings is that the laser is heating the material, causing the dye molecules to diffuse away from the beam. When the laser is turned off, the dye molecules diffuse back. So, rather than the molecules breaking apart and then reassembling themselves, they are just moving out then into the beam - a much less sexy phenomena.

The report of one of the reviewers summarizes our results best:

This manuscript describes a combined experimental and theoretical study on the recovery of absorption in dye-doped polymer samples exposed to high light intensities. There are several possible mechanisms for such a self-healing effect and it is of significant interest to understand which one(s) contribute. The paper presents a set of experimental data on the dynamics and spatial profile of the optical properties of the damage region. It then presents a thorough and detailed model of what is expected if diffusion of undamaged dye molecules into the damaged region is responsible for all or part of the recovery. The difference between the broadened profile of the concentration predicted by the diffusion model and the constant profile shape observed experimentally is persuasive in demonstrating that diffusion is not a significant contributor to the self-healing. The manuscript is well-presented, thorough, and sound. It warrants publication in JOSA B.

Congratulations to Shiva and Nathan for a job well done!

A silver lining

We have been visiting with family in the Philadelphia area. What should have been a fun time has been colored with tension and anxiety. First, there is the issue of what to do with my 95-year-old father.

He is highly independent, living on his own, cooking for himself, and competently driving a car. He and his buddies (all younger than him) occasionally drive to Cape May - a Victorian beach town. Also, he volunteers twice a week to work at the senior lunch, collecting the $1.50 cost of the meal, and making sure that the books are balanced. He even helps deliver food to the eighty-year olds with walkers.

Ten years ago, we built an addition to our home for my father. He refused to move in. I don't blame him. He has friends and activities to keep him busy. He participates in all sorts of events at the Ukrainian church and the Ukrainian Center. Pullman, on the other hand, has zero Ukrainians for him to befriend. Though we are there for him, work is a large part of our days, so he would be bored to death most of the time. In Philly, he is an active part of his microcommunity participating in his ethnic culture that he cherishes.

My father is concerned that his driver's license will not be renewed, rendering his present lifestyle impossible. We are also concerned that as he ages, he will become less independent. Our agonizing decision comes down to a choice between him continuing to live alone with the chance that he may injure himself, but otherwise a happy life; or, moving him to Pullman, and dooming him to certain misery. In my mind, both choices are far from ideal.

The other day, my father fell as a result of a dizzy spell. He was bruised but otherwise seemed unharmed. However, it was painful for him to walk, and his nurse (who visits him occasionally at home for blood tests), recommended that he get an X-ray to rule out a fractured hip. Fortunately, we had made plans to have lunch with good friends from Yardley. After lunch, John - an orthopedic surgeon, and his wife Camille - a physical therapist, checked my father's injuries and ordered X-rays as a precaution. The local hospital quickly determined that he had not sustained serious injury.

This whole process reminded us of my father's situation and the painful decisions ahead. Unfortunately, every option other than the status quo is unacceptable to him: No to senior living homes, no to roommates, no to moving to Pullman, etc. For now, we are making arrangements to simplify his daily routine, but some day, we will need to bring him to Pullman, kicking and screaming.

We have been driving extensively to get between my fathers place, and the various in-laws. As a result, I have been feeling depressed and anxious about not having time to work, not to mention my motion sickness. Yesterday afternoon, after arriving at my sister-in-law's vacation home in Delaware, I finally sat down at my computer to work, only to come down with a debilitating migraine headache that put me out of commission for the rest of the evening.

This morning, I awoke feeling physically well, but mentally exhausted with thoughts of the piles of work that has accumulated. As I was working, I got two pieces of good news:

First, I was notified that my NSF proposal on sum rules has been recommended for funding. However, there are several questions that I first need to address before approval. This will be my first priority, so my other work will need to wait.

While reading through the email from NSF, I got notification that a third paper on Nathan's work on photo mechanical liquid crystal elastomers was accepted. An excerpt of comments from each reviewer follows.

REVIEWER 1

The manuscript provides an in-depth model and related discussion on the deformation mechanism of azo containing liquid crystal elastomer upon a light trigger. The authors incorporated in the model heat effects as related to absorption and diffusion during and after exposure in the absorption band of the azo compound. To my opinion this was the first time that it was described so extensively rather than mentioning that heat effects might also play role next to the photo-isomerization reaction. For this reason it is my opinion that the paper should be published in the Journal of the Optical Society of America...

REVIEWER 2

In the manuscript “Modeling the mechanisms of the photomechanical response of a nematic liquid crystal elastomer”, authors have done the modeling to explain the plausible mechanisms involved in photomechanical response of nematic liquid crystal elastomer. In the previous report: N. J. Dawson et al., J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 28, 1916 (2011), authors have reported the experimental determination of mechanisms of photomechanical effects in a nematic liquid crystal elastomer in a particular device geometry. More interestingly, in the present report the models have been initially proposed and then used to compare with experimental results and to evaluate related material parameters. Undoubtedly, the theoretical modeling, comparison with experimental results and related explanations are up to the mark. Moreover, the report does not only demonstrate the fundamental mechanisms but also provide the platform for design of optical devices based on photomechanical effect and hence seems to be greatly useful for liquid crystal community as well as other related fields.

On the basis of the originality and novelty of the work presented in this report, I feel that it would be really of worth to keep this article in JOSA B. Therefore, I recommend it for the publication in JOSA B.

While life throws all sorts of crap our way, I take great comfort in the fact that I will be able to continue my work in sum rules, and how they elucidate the nature of light matter interactions. Future work in this area, while remaining on the esoteric side, is converging on ideas that will impact practical applications. These thoughts temporarily allow me to escape form my wories.

Gotta pack and run...

Good news comes in threes or fours (or fives!)

In the fall, I wrote of my despair when hearing about three papers that had been rejected, all in the same week. Finally, all of these papers are in various stages of the publication process.

First, our paper on photo-mechanical optical devices (which we call PODs), just appeared in Optics Communications this month, which you can view by clicking here. I have talked about this work at several conferences, and I am getting very positive feedback. I am hoping to get this work funded in the near future. I believe that breakthroughs in this area could lead to amazing new technologies that will excite even the most jaded techies.

Secondly, the paper that got the nasty review, which I described in my post The Good, the Bad, and the Nasty, just got accepted. The letter from the editor is appended to this post.

A recent paper that we submitted to Advanced Materials, a high-impact journal, just appeared in print. This is a comment that my former student and colleague Javier Perez-Morena and I wrote on the work of some of our colleagues from Australia. We showed that their results were even more important than they originally thought - a happy outcome for all!

I learned about all three good news items this morning.

Finally, our paper on imaging studies of self-healing will appear shortly in the Journal of the Optical Society of America B. In addition, we have several papers that are in various stages of preparation and under review. New trials and tribulations surely await us!

***Update*** After all of this good news, I was pleased to learn of a fifth item of good news. In a previous post, I had talked about our newest Monte Carlo work, which we submitted to JOSA B. I just heard from Shoresh that this paper was accepted for publication with optional minor revisions. For once, the reviewers and I agree!

Letter from Journal of Chemical Physics

February 8, 2011

Title: The effect of electron interactions on the universal properties of systems with optimized off-resonant intrinsic hyperpolarizability

Author(s): David Watkins and Mark Kuzyk

Professor Mark G. Kuzyk
Washington State University
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Post Office Box 642814
Pullman, WA 99164-2814


Dear Professor Kuzyk,

The above manuscript has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Chemical Physics. You may receive requests from our office to ensure that all manuscript files are complete and suitable for typesetting. Once the manuscript files are in an acceptable format, they will be forwarded to the American Institute of Physics publication office.

This e-mail is the only notification you will receive of the acceptance of your paper. If you have questions about the production of your manuscript, you may find contact information for AIP production staff at...


No revisions of the manuscript can be made before the galley proof stage.

Sincerely yours,

Letter from Advanced Materials

Dear Dr. Perez-Moreno,

We are pleased to inform you that your Comment

"A Correspondence on "Organometallic Complexes for Nonlinear Optics. 45.
Dispersion of the Third-Order Nonlinear Optical Properties of Triphenylamine-Cored Alkynylruthenium Dendrimers". Increasing the Nonlinear
Optical Response by Two Orders of Magnitude." by Javier Perez-Moreno, Javier Perez-Moreno
Mark G. Kuzyk
has now been published online.


Your article is available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/adma.201003421

The citation data and abstract (if applicable) are available free of charge from the same link; access to the full text may require a subscription.
Please use the above-mentioned URL to link to the article from your institutional homepage, e.g., on publication lists.

A reference to your article is also available from your personal homepage by selecting "Author" and then "My Published Articles".


Best wishes,

Advanced Materials
(Editorial Office)

Recent paper accepted

All papers are written with expectations that they will be appreciated by the scientific community. That's why authors are indignant when a manuscript gets rejected by reviewers before it can see the light of day in a scientific journal.

Recently, Shoresh submitted a manuscript to JOSA B (see http://lanl.arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1006/1006.1320v2.pdf for a preprint). In this work, he used Monte Carlo calculations, which were first implemented by my son, to let the computer role the dice to randomly determine transition moments and matrix elements of a hypothetical quantum system. To make the results consistent with quantum mechanics, we used a procedure that constrains the choices to be consistent with the sum rules. By rolling the dice millions of times, we can get a feeling for the properties of a much broader range of systems than one could synthesize in the laboratory.

In a paper that we published three years ago, we used this approach to study the hyperpolarizability. In the recent work, we aplied the approach to the second hyperpolarizability. The calculations yielded the same kind of surprising result, which this time around were a tad bit less unexpected, and that is that the Monte Carlo approach seems to give certain properties that are not observed experimentally nor predicted theoretically using standard Hamiltonians. The upshot is that some very exotic systems with a large second hyperpolarizabilities may be lurking out there - yet to be discovered.

Every time I submit a new paper, I fret that my long string of acceptances will come to an end. Sure, I have had manuscripts that got rejected, but eventually they get published once I fix some relatively minor error. W were delighted to have another acceptance. The reviewers' summaries follow this post. The detailed comments are technical in nature and have been omitted. The bottom line is that the paper is slated to be published in the next couple of months. While we are pleased, we are already working on the next two papers, each which extend our work to the next level. The more we learn, the longer term our goals become.

Reviewer comments appear here:

Reviewer 1
This manuscript is closely related to similar work on the first
hyperpolarizability by two of the authors (ref. 13) which sought
to understand the gap between the theoretical maximum
hyperpolarizability and the highest values measured experimentally.
The present paper extends this approach to the second
hyperpolarizability, γ, whose theoretical maximum value was derived
in ref. 2. In theory, the second hyperpolarizability in the zero-
frequency limit depends only upon the energies of the excited
states of the system and the transition dipole moments connecting
these states with each other and with the ground state. (Actually
the usual expression involves both transition dipole moments and
permanent dipole moments, but it can be transformed to one that
involves only transition dipoles as shown in ref. 19.)  There are
also fundamental sum rules that relate these quantities.  In this
manuscript, the authors use a Monte Carlo method to randomly sample
different combinations of excited state energies and transition
dipole moments, always requiring that they be constrained by the
general sum rules. The goal is to gain some insight into the
physical parameters needed to produce γ values near the theoretical
limit. The largest second hyperpolarizabilities found by this method
do approach the analytically calculated theoretical maximum.
Furthermore, these results indicate that the largest γ values are
found when only three states—the ground state and two excited
states dominate.

The manuscript is clearly written and well motivated.  While the
derivations refer to much previous work from the corresponding
author and his co-workers, it is not necessary to have read those
papers to understand the results presented here.  The results do
not provide much help to those trying to design real molecules with
large second hyperpolarizabilities.  However, they are certainly
interesting and this is a worthwhile addition to the literature of
this field from one of its
most original thinkers.

There are a few typos/misspellings/grammatical errors that do not
interfere with the readability of the paper.

Reviewer 2
This article presents very interesting new results and should
be published as soon as possible provided that some minor
changes/clarifications are addressed...