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Night events with DTU-Lys

laser-khet-featured-imageOn November 28th 2017 in the evening, our student chapter DTU-Lys held a competition in the board game KHET, which is a complicated form of Chess, but with laser beams. Our student chapter owns 4 of these board games – a perfect number for hosting a competition with both group stages and knock-out rounds! The winner of the tournament was on beforehand promised a DTU-Lys t-shirt, which we had recently acquired a number of for outreach purposes. In total, this evening event numbered around 30 participants, with a good mix of Master students and PhD students.

The evening started out with a 15 min introduction to our student chapter DTU-Lys, who we are, what we have done, and what plan to do. With the event taking place only half a month from our annual meeting and election in December, it was our hope, and plan, to lure in new potential active board members of DTU-Lys. Our current board now counts 4 new members who all participated in this event.

After the introduction, we divided people into four groups who were to play each other in order to decide who advanced from the group-stage and into the knock-out stage. We used chess-clock apps on our phones to make sure that the games did not continue in all eternity (this was an issue in the beginning) and to add an extra stress factor. During the night people had free access to beers and sodas, and after 1½ hour of playing everyone sat down and had pizza together.

All-in-all it was a very fun and social evening, and many of the participants urged us to organize a similar event in the spring 2018 – which we will certainly do!

Innovation and entrepreneurship lunches

5During Wednesday’s lunchtime on April 26, the Line of Light auditorium was crowded with 80 bachelor, master and PhD students interested to hear about optics and photonics technologies in the “Lunch with Industry” event. After grabbing a sandwich with soda, they focused their attention firstly to Peter Skovgaard, CEO and Co-founder from Norlase, and later to Sidsel Petersen, representing NKT Photonics company. Peter made a short overview of how their novel high-power visible laser technology allowed them to become a promising start-up company with a vision to outperform currently leading solutions available on the market. Sidsel, on the other hand, shared the vision and perspective of NKT Photonics – one of the leaders in the market of high performance fiber and laser technologies. She was generous enough to bring some of the examples of industrial photonic crystal fiber products, components, and materials used in fabrication.
…Thanks to Norlase and NKT Photonics for shedding some light on current status of the laser industry!

A week later, on Friday 5, serial entrepreneur David Hardwick gave the talk “Science for profit and fun in the laser industry” accompanied by Prof. Jes Broeng. The duo addressed entrepreneurship, and shed light on some of the best ways to start a business in an effort to inspire students with innovation dreams.
David Hardwick is co-founder and Chairman of Norlase and Fauna Photonics in Denmark and an investor and advisor at BiFrost Communications. David is a past member of the Optical Society of America (OSA) Board and the OSA Foundation. He is a consultant to IMRA America and other companies in the industry.
During this event, everybody got a chance to pick the two entrepreneurs’ brains at the following discussion and plenty of opportunity to mingle. What a great afternoon!

Lab tour following FUNlight

2015_Copenhagen_DTU_FUNLight_01The Copenhagen DTU YM Section helped with arranging a talk, funded by the OSA student chapter and the Department of Photonics, named FUNlight. FUNlight served as an informal lecture in which bachelor students were invited to get a closer look at research being done at the department, with subsequent free food and beverages. An oral presentation was made by Kresten Yvind, group leader of Nanophotonic Devices, who talked about Nano lasers and tunable MEMS lasers for OCT applications.
Directly following the FUNlight talk, students were given the opportunity for a lab tour both by the presenter as well as two EPS members: Ivan-Lazar Bundalo and Simone Gaiarin. They were thus given the opportunity to observe how cutting edge research equipment from different fields can actually look like in practice. The students, numbering around 20 people, were split in 3 groups and taken to 4 different labs from the fields:

  • Optical chips (interconnects)
  • Plastic fiber drawing tower
  • Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) fabrication and testing
  • High-speed optical communications

In drawing tower lab students were introduced to the whole process of making plastic optical fibers (step index and microstructured). They could see different stages of fiber fabrication as well as most common problems related to that technology and the research focus areas. In FBG lab they were shown how phase mask technique can be used with UV laser light to make FBGs in microstructured fibers. Further on, they have been shown the principle of how fiber optic strain, humidity and temperature sensors work.

The high-speed optical communication lab is mostly focused on system type of experiments using a combination of stock fiber and newly developed specialty fibers acquired from OFS Fitel Denmark and NTT Photonics Laboratories. The basics of long-reach optical communication and imperfections causing problems in transmission systems were explained.