Category Archives: Blog

Green Lantern and Limits of Imaging

As I was flipping through the pages of the book “How the Ray Gun Got Its Zap: Odd Excursions Into Optics” by Stephen R. Wilk (OUP, 2013), I saw the reference to the Green Lantern comics No:8 “The Challenge from 5700 A.D.” (Sept-Oct 1961) where the hero Green Lantern replays the actions of a previously lived event through the help of his ring, though still obeying the diffraction limited nature of imaging as explained in the editor’s note below.
Green_Lantern_no8_p12

Tracking Scientific Literature

Below is a scheme with which it becomes possible to systematically track the set of papers & books that falls within one’s interests. As a prerequisite to setting up such a system you need

  • a list of key papers for which you would like to track the forward references to,
  • a list of authors that publish in the field of interest,
  • a list of keywords that as precisely as possible define the topics of interest,
  • a list of journals to follow.

Once you have drafted these lists then you can use tools such as Google Scholar (alternatively ISI Web of Science) for citation information, an RSS Reader that lets you gather, store & filter feeds based on key words (such as Tiny Tiny RSS) and a web server to run the reader to set up your information tracking system. Lastly, and most importantly, you’d need to reserve time in your schedule for periodic reviews of the flood of information that comes through various channels sketched below.

literature_search_scheme

Plasmonic communications

The following article, and references therein, give a concise overview of the use of plasmonic structures for the transfer of information.

Plasmonic Communications: Light on a Wire, Juerg Leuthold and colleagues, Optics & Photonics News, May 2013, pp. 30-35.

New plasmonic devices are coming. They can be 100 times smaller and 1,000 times faster than current photonic devices. If we can fill the plasmonic “toolbox” and optimize performance, we will enjoy ultra-compact, integratable plasmonic transceivers with footprints of 1–100 µm2. At first, these devices may be used in novel highly integrated chip-to-chip interconnects. But as soon as we can overcome the high loss bottleneck, plasmonic devices will make their way into state-of-the-art wavelength-division multiplexing systems—and perhaps a new plasmonic revolution will begin.