Frontiers in Optics 2011 highlights recent advances in optical and laser science

WASHINGTON — (BUSINESS WIRE) — October 12, 2011 — Scientists and engineers from around the world will gather in the heart of Silicon Valley next week to discuss some of the latest breakthroughs in lasers and optics and their applications to cutting-edge science, the development of new materials, and medicine.

Journalists are invited to Frontiers in Optics ( FiO) 2011/Laser Science XXVII—the 95th annual meeting of the Optical Society ( OSA), which is being held together with the annual meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) Division of Laser Science at the Fairmont San Jose Hotel in San Jose, Calif. Oct 16-20. Registration details are below.

Many of the presentations at the meeting focus on the most cutting-edge discoveries in applied optics and fundamental physics. Some highlights, described below, include:

1. Tagging Tumors with Gold: Scientists Use Gold Nanorods to Flag Brain Tumors

2. Erasing History? Temporal Cloaks Adjust Light’s Throttle to Hide an Event in Time

3. Borrowing from Brightly-colored Birds: Physicists Develop Lasers Inspired by Nature

Additional meeting and research highlights, including research on transforming an iPhone into a high-quality medical imaging device, can be found online in the FiO Media Center.

1. Tagging Tumors with Gold: Scientists Use Gold Nanorods to Flag Brain Tumors

“It’s not brain surgery” is a phrase often uttered to dismiss a job’s difficulty, but when the task actually is removing a brain tumor, even the slightest mistake could have serious health consequences. To help surgeons in such high-pressure situations, researchers from Prof. Adam Wax’s team at Duke University’s Fitzpatrick Institute for Photonics and Biomedical Engineering Department have proposed a way to harness the unique optical properties of gold nanoparticles to clearly distinguish a brain tumor from the healthy, and vital, tissue that surrounds it. The team will present their research next week at OSA’s Frontiers in Optics 2011 meeting.

Current techniques for outlining brain tumors vary, but all have limitations, such as the inability to perform real-time imaging without big, expensive equipment, or the toxicity and limited lifespan of certain labeling agents. Gold nanoparticles—which are so small that 500 of them end-to-end could fit across a human hair—might provide a better way to flag tumorous tissue, since they are non-toxic and relatively inexpensive to manufacture.

The Duke researchers synthesized gold, rod-shaped nanoparticles with varying length-to-width ratios. The different-sized particles displayed different optical properties, so by controlling the nanorods’ growth the team could “tune” the particles to scatter a specific frequency of light. The researchers next joined the tuned particles to antibodies that bind to growth factor receptor proteins found in unusually high concentrations on the outside of cancer cells. When the antibodies latched on to cancer cells, the gold nanoparticles marked their presence.

The team tested the method by bathing slices of tumor-containing mouse brain in a solution of gold nanoparticles merged with antibodies. Shining the tuned frequency of light on the sample revealed bright points where the tumors lurked. The tunability of the gold nanoparticles is important, says team member Kevin Seekell, because it allows researchers to choose from a window of light frequencies that are not readily absorbed by biological tissue. It might also allow researchers to attach differently tuned nanoparticles to different antibodies, providing a way to diagnose different types of tumors based the specific surface proteins the cancer cells display. Future work by the team will also focus on developing a surgical probe that can image gold nanoparticles in a living brain, Seekell says.

FiO presentation FWL4, "Controlled Synthesis of Gold Nanorods and Application to Brain Tumor Delineation," by Kevin Seekell et al. is at 11:45 a.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 19.

EDITOR’S NOTE: High-resolution images are available upon request. Contact Angela Stark, Email Contact.

2. Erasing History? Temporal cloaks adjust light’s throttle to hide an event in time

Researchers from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., have demonstrated for the first time that it’s possible to cloak a singular event in time, creating what has been described as a “history editor.” In a feat of Einstein-inspired physics, Moti Fridman and his colleagues sent a beam of light traveling down an optical fiber and through a pair of so-called “time lenses.” Between these two lenses, the researchers were able to briefly create a small bubble, or gap, in the flow of light. During that fleetingly brief moment, lasting only the tiniest fraction of a second, the gap functioned like a temporal hole, concealing the fact that a brief burst of light ever occurred.

Their ingenious system, which is the first physical demonstration of a phenomenon originally described theoretically a year ago by Martin McCall and his colleagues at Imperial College London in the Journal of Optics, relies on the ability to use short intense pulses of light to alter the speed of light as it travels through optical materials, in this case an optical fiber. (In a vacuum, light maintains its predetermined speed limit of 180,000 miles per second.) As the beam passes through a split-time lens (a silicon device originally designed to speed up data transfer), it accelerates near the center and slows down along the edges, causing it to balloon out toward the edges, leaving a dead zone around which the light waves curve. A similar lens a little farther along the path produces the exact but opposite velocity adjustments, resetting the speeds and reproducing the original shape and appearance of the light rays.