I went to AKL in Aachen last week, attended all 3 days, from the tech day to the visit of the Fraunhofer ILT, and the conferences in between. Here is my take on what I learned there....
I have always been interested with optics and vision. My path led me to a more technological approach of optics, aka photonics, but I still am fascinated by the process of vision. How the image is formed in the eye, how it is interpreted in the brain and so on. This led me to learn a few things that apparently are not so well known about our own eyes. One of these things is the subject of this pos...
I know, this comet was seen 1 and a half year ago, but I didn't had a blog then, so I have to do it now......
I wrote about Carrington events here, just a few days before the solar cycle 23 unleashed some strong storm with an X1 flare the 28th October and several other CMEs the next days... Fortunately, the impact on earth was minimal: It was a mostly a miss. But it sparked some wonderful display of aurora in the last days of October. See here and here for some nice images....
Continuing the series on lasers. In the first part, I went fast over plenty of concepts and left others on the side because they were not necessary to get a global understanding of lasers. Here, I want to get a little deeper in some specific concepts. I want to talk more in details about the gain medium of a laser and why population inversion is a vital concept....
As a physics student, our teachers would usually spend a few minutes talking about how it is extremely important to check dimensions. Back then, I was listening and not really thinking how that would help me concretely to find the answer to the problem they were giving us. I would always be puzzled by why they were talking about this, and then never, ever, using it themselves in class or during th...
So I want to start a series of posts that will focus mostly on lasers, what they are, how they work, what are the most important elements, etc... It can still evolve....
I am a fan of disaster movies. I have grown in the 90's and 00's, at a time where Hollywood started a trend of summer blockbusters that usually involved alien invasion, or volcanoes and other gigantic threat that was supposed to threaten the existence of Humanity. We had it all: Independence Day, Volcano, Armageddon, Deep Impact, 12 monkeys, etc... Spectacular and frightening....