For advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and recent postdocs in photonics, one of the hottest summer programs around is I-CAMP, the inter-continental advanced materials for photonics summer school.  It is “inter-continental” because it combines education at the interdisciplinary frontiers of photonics with an introduction to a different culture each year.  This year, the host country was China.

The 2009 I-CAMP summer school, held June 28-July 19, was organized by Ivan Smalyukh of the University of Colorado – Boulder, Yuen Ron Shen of UC – Berkeley, and Sailing He of Zhejiang University, China, and the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden.  They selected different venues for each of three focus topics:

• Week 1, Materials for Biophotonics and Renewable Energy.   Hangzhou and Shanghai
• Week 2, Materials for Electro-Optics, Nonlinear Optics, and Displays.  Qingdao
• ŸWeek 3, Metamaterials and Photonic Crystals.  Beijing.

School participants learned about the emerging uses of light for control and for the fundamental study of matter, as well as advances in the use of materials to control light, covering a broad range of topics in materials science, optics, photonics, biophysics, and nanoscience.

One topic of major interest was light harvesting for renewable energy applications.  The tutorial lectures by Wladek Walukiewicz of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory covered photovoltaic devices and the newest super-high-efficiency solid-state approaches.  Sandeep Kumar of the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore, India, discussed very promising light-harvesting approaches utilizing self-assembly of organic molecules for organic photovoltaics applications—somewhat less efficient than those described by Walukiewicz,  but also  much less expensive.

The students had a chance to learn what is new and cool in the science and technology of photonic-crystal fibers from their inventor, Philip Russell of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light.  Halina Rubinsztein-Dunlop of the University of Queensland in Australia demonstrated how, using optical trapping techniques, a beam of light can be used to manipulate biological systems and materials structures on the nano- and micrometer scales.  Her demonstrations included detailed, insightful explanations of the physics concepts involved.  Mohan Srinivasarao of Georgia Institute of Technology described how the beautiful colors in butterflies and beetles, as well as in other biological systems,  arise as a result of rather advanced structural features, including photonic crystals.

For a program listing these and other lectures by the 25 invited faculty, see the I-CAMP website http://icamconferences.org/i-camp/.   Just over 100 students from all over the world attended, though a few came for only one or two out of the three weeks offered. Real-time webcasts enabled an additional 46 participants to take in the lectures from remote locations.  There were three poster sessions, one per week, with practically all of the I-CAMP students presenting their work.  Faculty and local organizers evaluated the posters to select the Best Poster Presentation awards, sponsored by SPIE.  The winners were Uros Tkalec of Slovenia (Beijing poster session), Quingkun Liu of China (Qingdao poster session), and Dennis Gardner of the US (Hangzhou poster session).

Tours, excursions, and other activities following the lectures were organized by battalions of local volunteers and provided a welcome chance to learn more about China and its history as well as to talk in an informal setting.  At a gathering sponsored by SPIE, karate demonstrations and lessons on traditional Chinese dancing led into a party that lasted late into the night.

I2CAM was the major sponsor of this summer school, while additional support came from the International Society for Optical Engineering, the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE), NSF, the Liquid Crystal Materials Research Center in Colorado, Hisense (a major photonics company in China), and the four Chinese research institutions assisting with local organization—Zhejiang University, Shanghai Institute for Applied Physics (SINAP), Ocean University of China, and Beijing Institute of Technology.

The venue for the next I-CAMP will be the campus of the University of Queensland in Australia.  Its organizers, Ivan Smalyukh and Halina Rubinsztein-Dunlop, plan to offer twenty fellowships to support travel and participation of early-career scientists, for which they are seeking funding from several agencies.  ICAM, as the major sponsor of the summer camp, is likely to provide many of these.

A three-part photo archive of this year’s meeting, one part for each venue, can be found at  http://picasaweb.google.co.in/ICAMP2009China/ICAMP2009HangzhouAndShanghaiSession?feat=email#

http://picasaweb.google.co.in/icamp2009beijing/ICAMP2009BeijingSession?feat=email

http://picasaweb.google.co.in/icamp2009qingdao/ICAMP2009QingdaoSession?feat=email

By Karie Friedman, ICAMNews, October 2009