OSA-NTU 2006

A few tears were also shed this year when the NTU OSA student chapter said goodbye to two of our graduating members Ahluwalia Balpreet Singh and Charles Ho. Fortunately the goodbye lasted only a few months, as both of them are now research staff back in the Photonics laboratory of NTU. Our chapter officially welcomes them back as honored alumni members.

We look forward to an exciting year in 2007 with many more activities and opportunities to grow as a chapter.
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The chapter held organized a postgraduate seminar for the chapter members and several graduate students working in the Photonics lab. Amidst the camaraderie of having friends with shared experiences, the first speaker was our very own Mr Balpreet Singh who recently submitted his thesis. Balpreet shared with us his personal experiences of writing up a thesis. The participants found the candid sharing valuable and insightful, many of us picked up useful tips and learned of several pitfalls to avoid.

Balpreet shares his experience and tips on writing up a thesis. We all paid particular attention to the portion on “how to manage your professor’s expectations”

Everyone found the session practical as GIMP is an extremely versatile tool that can be used for preparing research posters, cropping images for data presentation in journal papers and enhancing digital photographs

We carefully timed out welcome tea to the recent intake of a new batch of postgraduate students in the Photonics laboratory @ NTU. It was a informal get-to-know you better session and we also had the priviledge of having Shuying give us a talk on "Basics of webpage designs: 5 things you should know". Members were also treated to a photo montage of our chapter photographs taken over the past year.

OSA-NTU student chapter members involvement in International Physics Olympiad IPHO 2006.

Eight hundred physics whizzes from 90 countries arrived in NTU for the 37th International Physics Olympiad. It was a special occasion for us in NTU because it was also the first time that Singapore hosted the prestigious IPHO event. The chapter vice-president Mr Landobasa Yosef Mario and new student member Mr Damon Wong participated as examiner/moderators in the event. Mr Landobasa was a veteran participant in his high school days, this time round he was responsible for the pre-testing and verification of an experiment involving the determination of a lattice constant of a copper rods array hidden inside a box. The student chapter as a whole also took the opportunity to attend public lectures conducted by Four Nobel Laureates who graced the Olympiad.

Our chapter is grateful for the opportunity to have visiting professor Assoc. Prof Rainer Dumke talk to us on the field of ultra cold atom physics. We learned that under unimaginably cold conditions, the elusive quantum world comes into focus. This world can be reached by modern laser cooling technology - proving that optics/photonics is a key enabling technology in exotic and fundamental research.

Dr. Rainer Dumke from the School of Physical & Mathematical Sciences gives a brief insight in the field of ultra cold atom physics and optical trapping.

HighTec U visits Photonics lab@NTU, 7th Nov 2006

A group of 30 high school students, some teachers and several staff from SEMI Foundation from the US visited the Photonics Laboratory in NTU (home to our OSA-Singapore Chapter) on Tuesday, 7 Nov 2006, under the High Tech U (HTU) program. The SEMI Foundation was formed in 2003 to support education and awareness of the field of high technology. The Foundation’s “High Tech U” program encourages high school students to stay in school; take math, science and technology courses. This was the second run of the HTU (the first was also hosted in Singapore earlier in March 2006) and the first international HTU program held outside of the United States. Our chapter members where delighted at the opportunity to showcase several of our projects during the lab tour.

Chapter member Sun Yuyang explaining his all-optical-cell-sorting method, Eddie Tan (one of our founding chapter member and recent graduate) enthusiastically describes the OCT technique to his audience.

The projects that we demonstrated had optics and light as the central common theme, but their applications were either in bio-photonics (optics for biological applications) or micro-optics and optoelectronics. Individual bio-photonics projects included experiments in optical tweezers and cell sorting, optical coherence tomography (OCT) and micro-fluidic chips with integrated micro-optics. The micro-optics and optoelectronics portion of the lab tour involved optical MEMs, prototype photonic crystal devices, semiconductor lasers and multimode interferometers (MMIs) fabricated using microlithographic techniques.

Chapter member Lee Shuying shows her charges the effects of polarization in her MMI setup.

We hoped that the demonstrations allowed our guests to make connections between science and math as classroom subjects to real-world applications. Specifically our chapter members also emphasized the relevance of optics in a host of other practical examples. We wish our young visitors a bright future and hope that many will be encouraged to see science, engineering and research as a possible career option.