Virtual Event: Pulse Measurement and Optics Education: Re-inventing the Lecture: Rick Trebino

https://illinois.zoom.us/j/87287858886?pwd=VXBMZnZkbzZuc1FsTXRhYnZPdHFHdz09

Meeting ID: 872 8785 8886

Passcode: 582592

Pulse Measurement information:

The vast majority of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time have resulted directly from more powerful techniques for measuring light. Indeed, our most important source of information about our universe is light, and our ability to extract information from it is limited only by our ability to measure it. Interestingly, most of the light in our universe remains immeasurable, involving long pulses or continuous beams of relatively broad-band light,necessarily involving ultrafast and extremely complex temporal variations in their intensity and phase(color). As a result, it’s important to develop techniques for measuring, ever more completely, light with ever more complex ultrafast variations in time. The problem is severely complicated by the fact that the timescales involved correspond to the shortest events ever created, and measuring an event in time seems to require a shorter one, which, by definition, doesn’t exist! And, unfortunately, many methods currently in common use measure only artifacts and/or cannot distinguish between short, simple, stable pulses and long, complex, unstable ones. Fortunately, we have developed simple, elegant techniques for reliably and completely measuring such light, using the light to measure itself and extracting a light pulse’s complete intensity and phase vs. time—and, more recently, time and space simultaneously. One such technique involves making an optical spectrogram of the pulse,whose mathematics is solvable only because the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra fails for polynomials of two variables. More recent methods allow the simple measurement of the complete spatio-temporal electric field[E(x,y,z,t)] of a single, arbitrary, potentially complex light pulse without the need to average over multiple pulses.

Re-inventing the Lecture:

The academic lecture was invented in ancient Sumer, using a stylus to inscribe cuneiform on a clay tablet. While it was a good idea then, it hasn’t improved in the 5000 years since then. It has even nearly completely sat out the spectacular ongoing digital revolution, continuing to comprise a stark talking head before a bleak black(or white) board.Worse, lecture preparation is quite time-consuming, and teaching materials, such as lecture notes, are not helpful. So,the tedious task of preparing lectures is currently performed independently—and hence massively redundantly—by every teacher on earth. In other words, the world’s current educational-lecture paradigm is analogous to that of books prior to Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. As a result, lecture preparation by the world’s 50 million post-primary-school instructors currently absorbs tens of billions of human-hours annually, corresponding to a cost of roughly a trillion dollars a year. So, it’s time to re-invent the lecture and to do for lectures what Gutenberg did for books. And I’ve done so for two college courses, Modern Physics and Optics. During the pandemic, I created highly polished talking-head-free multimedia videos of all the lectures for the entirety of both courses. And I freely share them with the world, saving students much boredom and stress and lecturers much time—freeing up instructors’ time for more personal interaction with their students. In short, I believe that this societal transformation is long overdue, and the resulting better educated population would yield additional benefits for the entire world for the foreseeable future.

Bio:

Rick Trebino was born in Boston on January 18, 1954. He was quite poor as a child, but, on scholarships, he earned his high-school degree from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, his B.A. from Harvard in 1977, and his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1983.Shortly afterward, while at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California, he invented Frequency-Resolved Optical Gating (FROG), the first technique for the complete measurement of an ultrashort laser pulse in time, solving this long-standing famous problem in the field of ultrafast optics and advancing pulse measurement from blurry black-and-white snapshots to high-resolution full-color displays. In 1998, he accepted a Chair at Georgia Tech, where he extended humankind’s measurement capability to the complete spatiotemporal electromagnetic field of even highly complex ultrashort pulses. He currently also develops more advanced approaches to optics and physics education, doing for lectures what Gutenberg did for books. He’s received numerous prestigious awards, including 2024’s R.W. Wood Prize and several for his pioneering contributions to optics and physics education, and is a Fellow of four scientific societies.He freely provides his elegant, entertaining, and fully narrated multimedia entire-course video lectures to the world via his web site to encourage the creation of free high-quality video lectures in academia in general.