Fall 2006
In This Issue:
Focus On Optical Materials
Message from the Director
Optical Materials Reveal the Power of Light
In this issue of Focus on Materials, you will read about the multiple uses of light and the unique power of optical materials in harnessing light and the information that light can carry. At Penn State, more than 30 faculty teams are involved in interdisciplinary research in photonics, which is the science and technology of generating, controlling, and detecting the photons that constitute light through the use of optical materials. This research activity is creating fundamental breakthroughs that impact areas of vital concern to society — including communications, medicine, energy, and defense — and at the same time is driving economic development across the Commonwealth through the Penn State Electro-Optics Center in western Pennsylvania and the Center for Optical Technology at Lehigh University.
What electronics was to the 20th century, photonics will be for the 21st century: a better, faster, more powerful way to communicate and process information. With the rapid expansion of the optical fiber network, light has already provided the capability of transmitting many tens of thousands of different streams of information simultaneously through a single fiber around the globe. New breakthroughs, including one reported on in this issue, will make the information superhighway not only faster and more versatile, but cheaper as well.
New optical materials are also creating newer, less expensive, and (in theory) inexhaustible sources of energy. The more widespread use of highly efficient light-emitting diodes (LEDs) for general lighting could dramatically reduce our energy consumption and save consumers many billions of dollars each year. In this issue, one Penn State researcher describes how studying stress in the optical thin film materials used to manufacture LEDs could lead to cheaper, more efficient lighting.
In the emerging field of biophotonics, light is being used to manipulate and study life at the scale of a cell and down to the molecular level. Using femtosecond bursts of laser light, laser beams can serve as ‘optical tweezers’ or be directed toward fluorescent molecules within the cell's plasma membrane. In this way, an interdisciplinary group of Penn State researchers is gaining new knowledge about the processes that cause diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and breast cancer.
We hope you will find this issue of the MRI Bulletin of value. If there are subjects you would like to see covered in future issues, please contact our editorial office. We appreciate your comments and suggestions.
Sincerely,
Carlo Pantano
Director of the Materials Research Institute
and Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering
To access the materials expertise at Penn State, please visit our Materials Research Institute web site at www.mri.psu.edu, or the Industrial Research Office web site at www.techtransfer.psu.edu/iro/.
