ICO presents Galileo Galileo award
The International Commission for Optics (ICO; Paris, France) recently presented its year 2000 Galileo Galileo Award to Vladimir P. Lukin of the department of Atmospheric Optics at the Russian Academy of Sciences (Tomsk, Russia) in recognition of his contributions in adaptive optics and light propagation through turbulent media. Established in 1993, the award is presented annually to a person who has made outstanding contributions to the field of optics under unfavorable circumstances related to economic and social conditions, and to accessibility of advanced scientific facilities.
Researchers develop new glass for holographic data storage
Engineers at Canadian optoelectronics manufacturer Optenia Inc., working with colleagues at Complutense University of Madrid (Madrid, Spain), believe they have developed a practical holographic medium that resolves several problematic requirements critical for commercial data-storage applications. The researchers suspended photoactive chemicals in a porous silica glass to form a hybrid organic-inorganic glass called Ormosil. The manufacturing process for the new medium does not require the high processing temperatures typical of glass manufacturing, which means that thermally sensitive compounds could be added to the material. The resulting medium is castable in almost any thickness, allowing the production of slab-like structures with large data-storage capacities.
MetaStable Instruments receives an SBIR contract to develop laser-beam steerers
MetaStable Instruments Inc. has received a $715,000 small-business innovation research (SBIR) contract to further the development of its Beam Tweaker light-beam steering technology. The two-year contract, which was awarded by the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization under its SBIR Fast Track program, will be managed by the US Army Space and Missile Defense Command (Huntsville, AL). Its specific focus will be to develop commercially viable beam steerers for lasers and other optical devices that will utilize a "virtual lever arm" design. Most of the resulting devices will be refractive steerers (adjustable optical wedges) that deviate the direction of transmitted light with a single on-axis center of scan.
NASA selects contractors for Gamma-Ray spacecraft design study
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (Greenbelt, MD) has chosen Lockheed Martin Corp. (Bethesda, MD) and TRW (Cleveland, OH) to perform spacecraft accommodation studies for the Gamma-Ray Large-Area Space Telescope (GLAST) Observatory. The two contractors, working independently, will each receive $600,000 to develop an optimal design for a spacecraft to house GLAST's two main instruments: the Large-Area Telescope and the GLAST Burst Monitor. This space-science experiment, scheduled for a 2006 launch into a low-earth orbit, is expected to bridge the fields of astronomy and particle physics in the study of black-hole particle jets and other high-energy phenomena.
Rocky Mountain Instrument Co. opens coating facility in Korea
Rocky Mountain Instrument Co. (Lafayette, CO), which manufactures laser optics and thin-film coatings, has opened an optics and coating manufacturing facility in Kyungkido, Korea. The plant, which supplements the firm's current custom-precision prism operations, produces prisms and prism assemblies in high volume for the telecommunications, electronics, and imaging industries.
Also in the news. . .
Optical components manufacturer Teraxion has closed a $15-million first round of Series A private-placement funding. . . . ARRYX Inc., which is developing commercial applications for holographic optical-trapping technology, has received $2.2 million in initial funding.
Sally Cole Cederquist and Paula Noaker Powell