LEOS is celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2007. To commemorate the event, the Newsletter will include many special features throughout the year. LEOS Founding President Dr. Henry Kressel has provided an introductory article in this issue, outlining how the society was born. Each issue will also contain a reprint of an abstract from the most cited articles in LEOS Journals. Each abstract will be accompanied by commentaries from one of the authors and another luminary in the field. This month, we are pleased to highlight a paper by Dr. Mansoor Sheik-Bahae et al describing the “Z-Scan” technique for measuring nonlinear optical coefficients. This Journal of Quantum Electronics article has been cited an impressive 1322 times since its publication in 1990! Co-author Prof. Eric Van Stryland of CREOL at the University of Central Florida and Prof. Y. Ron Shen of the University of California, Berkeley, have provided commentaries about the origin of the work and its impact since its publication.
Our regular features include research highlights and membership activities. This issue includes two University Research Highlights articles. Prof. Hui Cao of Northwestern University and her co-workers present recent results on Chaotic Microcavity Lasers. Andrea Fratalocchi of University Roma Tre in Italy and his co-workers present work on Discrete Optics in Liquid Crystalline Lattices. We also have a special article by Dr. Lianshan Yan, coordinator of the LEOS GOLD (Graduates of the Last Decade) program, and a description of the new LEOS chapter in Hangzhou, China by Dr. Erik Forsberg.
LEOS is “The Society for Photonics”, and the Newsletter will continue to highlight photonics activities from all over the world this year. The Associate Editors (Professors Amr Helmy of the University of Toronto, Hon Tsang of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Kevin Williams of the Technical University of Eindhoven) and I plan to add more features that members will find informative and enlightening in the coming months.
Please feel free to send any comments and suggestions to HYPERLINK " mailto:k.parameswaran@ieee.org" I would love to hear from you!