QuNo 2009 was a big success, with fantastic talks, excellent food, and plentiful dunkings in gorgeous Kananaskis river! Here are just a few pictures, but many more can be found here.




The original conference information page can be viewed here.

Alberto Marino: Travelling Lecture Series

This march the University of Calgary OSA Student chapter hosted NIST researcher Alberto Marino under the Optical Society of America's Travelling Researcher Grant. Alberto enlightened us with his lastest research on creating entangled images using a nonlinear optical process. His talk may be found here!

OSA Student Chapter at the University of Calgary Starts Activities

Our chapter has officially started activities during this year by hosting two join Colloquia with the Institute for Quantum Information Science. We have decided to personalize our sponsored events by inviting successful young researchers from top universities, aiming to increase the interaction and feedback of our members with the invited speakers. Also +

the Student Chapter sponsored wine and cheese to make the events even classier. Our two distinguished guests were Pavel Kolchin from the University of Stanford and Matthew Eisaman from NIST-Maryland. More than 40 attendees joined us for each talk and the following mini-party. We finished our guest visits with a nice trip to the mountains for a weekend of healthy skiing-snowboarding.



Picture 1: Pavel Kolchin (second from the right) and students gathering after a Sky-trip in Banff. Picture 2. Matthew Eisaman (second from the left) and students chatting at the U of C Grad Lounge.



We also kicked off our outreach program aimed for kids with high prospects for science. In the program students were given a chance to observe cutting edge research in
Quantum Optics this summer at the Institute for Quantum Information Science. Our student chapter provides our guests with a guided tour of the Quantum Technology laboratories that are currently performing experiments in the production and storage on non-classical light. The interested students were guided through the process of performing a modern optical experiment, from the production of electronics, to the alignment of the optics, to the analysis of the data The students brought their share of questions ranging from, “why can’t use a flashlight instead of a laser?”, to “what fills the space inside an atom?”. Many of the students were awed at the production of blue light from a red nonlinear crystal, and were captivated by the speckle pattern from the 10W green laser. One of the positive outcomes from these tours was the amount of interaction between the students and those giving the tours. No one was shy about asking questions, and all seemed to benefit in some way from the answers. Since the event was a great success we plan to continue with more tours on the coming year!






Picture 3. Our young guests at the Quantum Technology lab. Picture 4. Andrew explaining how the lasers communicate with the atoms. Picture 5. Eden explaining where we put the atoms for our experiments.