Orad Reshef

Professor Emeritus Rainer Weiss, influential physicist who forged new paths to understanding the universe, dies at 92 MIT Professor Emeritus Rainer Weiss, a renowned experimental physicist and Nobel laureate whose groundbreaking work on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) confirmed a longst...

1/ Rainer Weiss, who conceived of the idea of a gravitational wave detector (which eventually became LIGO), has died.

I was at MIT when the first gravitational wave detection was announced, and he gave perhaps the most inspiring colloquium I have ever heard.

news.mit.edu/2025/profess...

Ohhh I didn’t know he died! What an awesome guy

Hello hello Anya! Welcome!!

Pavel Cheben: The 2025 SPIE Maria Goeppert Mayer Award in Photonics For pioneering contributions to silicon photonic waveguide devices, including the invention of metamaterial waveguides and advancing sub-wavelength integrated photonics technology

🏆 SPIE Maria Goeppert Mayer Award in Photonics: Pavel Cheben, NRC Canada, Principal Research Officer

For pioneering contributions to silicon photonic waveguide devices, including the invention of metamaterial waveguides + advancing sub-wavelength integrated #photonics tech. spie.org/news/pavel-c...

How can quantum entanglement be instantaneous (so, “faster” than the speed of light) while also not violating causality?

John Bell gave a classic analogy: "When the Queen dies in London, the Prince of Wales, lecturing in Australia, becomes instantaneously King".

TIL that the no-hair theorem actually hasn't been fully proven quite yet. It has in some limited cases, and even in the case of gravity without electromagnetism, it has only been partially resolved.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-hair...

Relaxed Phase-Matching Constraints in Zero-Index Waveguides Experiments in Dirac-cone metamaterials present the first observation of direction-independent phase matching in a medium where phase matching is relevant for parametric nonlinear optical processes.

Does a publication in PRL count as evidence of being a physicist? 😁 journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...

Still not very, but there’s tons of remote opportunities these days!

Haven’t mentioned it publicly, but I’m looking for my next job!

Please reach out if you hear of any interesting opportunities. You can learn more about who I am and what I can do at my portfolio site:

reshef.ca

Yea this last one is really a thing. I think a lot of those AI photonics startups pivoted exactly this way.

You really couldn’t get away with that. VCs ask too many questions, you’d effectively be working on 2 companies simultaneously

Seems cool, looking forward to reading it more closely

#Polaritons enable high performance angle-independent optical filters. Immensely enjoyed this collaboration between
@thegatherlab.bsky.social, the Vandewal group at UHasselt and University of St Andrews
rdcu.be/d2hUo

I direct you to @drarmani.bsky.social’s advice section on her old research site:

armani.usc.edu/advice/

YouTube video by xkcd's What If? But what if we tried MORE power?

A great video on extreme nonlinear optics and the GZK limit (?), featured on the xkcd youtube channel.

What if we shined collimated gamma ray bursts on to the moon?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgaf...

Title and author block All-passive upconversion imaging of incoherent near-infrared light at intensities down to 50 nW/cm2 Rabeeya Hamid1, Demeng Feng1, Pournima Narayanan2, Justin S. Edwards3, Manchen Hu4, Emma Belliveau4, Minjeong Kim1, Sanket Deshpande1, Chenghao Wan4, Linda Pucurimay5, David A. Czaplewski6, Daniel N. Congreve4, Mikhail A. Kats1,3* 1Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, 53706, USA 2Department of Chemistry, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA 3Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, 53706, USA 4Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA 5Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA 6Center for Nanoscale Materials, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Illinois 60439, USA

Frequency conversion using approaches different from conventional nonlinearities opens the door to working with low-intensity incoherent light, perhaps eventually as slow as nightglow at night

Fun and rewarding collaboration between UW-Madison, Stanford, and Argonne arxiv.org/abs/2411.18707

Mindblowing that we invented this word, and now it's part of the sum of human knowledge 💡

Welcome Alex 👋

Hologram taken in the 1970s at the University of Franche-Comté - Zoom of Asterix.

Hologram taken in the 1970s at the University of Franche-Comté - porcelain figurines of Asterix and Obelix.

At the University of Franche-Comté, some incredible holograms were made in the 1970s. Here is a photo of one with some well-known characters, but have a good look at the right hand photo. Aside from the shadows, what beautiful ray-optics process is being accurately recorded by the hologram?

Shining a red laser through a broken optical fibre, resulting in a very obvious loss of guided light at the broken position

On the bright side, you will instantly see when it’s broken…

Lots of new people joining Bluesky and following me!

I’m happy to follow most of you back… you should at the very least complete your profile and maybe make one post with a general introduction so I know who you are. Most people won’t follow empty accounts back ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

YouTube video by Archive UK tv The Ideal Gas Law

This clip is mindblowing. What we used to do to simulate things before modern computers!
#ITeachPhysics 🎢

youtu.be/foB9vjgdDjs?...

Scientists, when do we start lobbying for #Bluesky to implement native LaTeX support?

#science #physics #mathematics

🧪⚛️

Jerry Terry Gary Larry and sometimes Barry

Incidentally, the Canadian POM #canpom is today!

https://photonicsonlinemeetup.org/

The founders of the Photonic Online Meeting #POM since 2019 are reunited on 🦋 @mickeykats.bsky.social @drarmani.bsky.social @riccard0.bsky.social @sylvaingigan.bsky.social @oradr.bsky.social and last but not least @igordownunder.bsky.social 💡Hello everyone! 📍https://photonicsonlinemeetup.org/

lol wut? I thought threads was enormous