Rather than letting the year fizzle out, I chose to again spend the last few days before the Christmas break at the the British and Irish Conference on Optics and Photonics (BICOP) on London. This meeting is organised by Optica, the Optical Society, and hosted in the fantastic venue of the IET. It’s particularly convenient for me as it’s barely a 10 minute walk from Charing Cross Station, making it only a slightly longer commute than my normal trip to Canterbury, and so avoids the need for a hotel stay.
This meeting mostly stays away from biomedical optics, but I think it’s good investment of time to occasionally attend meetings slightly outside your field, especially ones with a high proportion of invited speakers. Most of the talks I attended were on topics such as fibre communications, photonic integrated circuits and quantum computing, with surprisingly good representation from industry. We were still able to have a poster on some of our work, presented by our postdoc Dr Radu Stancu, showcasing applications of common path optical coherence tomography across a few different applications.
The conference began on Tuesday lunchtime with a great talk from Prof David Richardson, formerly of the ORC at Southampton but now at Microsoft UK, on hollow core fibres. I hadn’t realised how far their translation to field applications has come, or quite how big the advantages now are over conventional fibre. It’s a nice example of a technology developed and nurtured in the UK that has reached technical maturity. There was also a simple demo of a hollow core fibre in the coffee room from the ORC – I hadn’t seen one in the flesh before.
There were quite a few talks on packing and interconnects, a topic about which I know virtually nothing, but which seems to be absolutely critical for some emerging applications of photonic computing and integrated circuits. While I’m sure I missed some of the nuances, there are some interesting overlaps with some of our work, as they both involve micro-optics and alignment of these optics with fibres, and I had some interesting conversations.
Wednesday morning focused on quantum sensing, and it was fascinating to hear talks from a few start-ups in this field. It was good to be reminded of how important optics is to many of these technologies, something we should stress to our students more at Kent. I unfortunately missed some of the later talks on space applications that day (as well as mince pies and mulled mine) as I needed to catch an earlier train back to be in time to watch my daughter in her school choir for her school’s Christmas concert.
The final day was a mix of topics. The small amount of biomedical content was here, including Raman spectroscopy and lab on a fibre, with invited talks from Fioan Lyng and Andrea Cusano. It was more familiar territory, although still plenty to learn. There were some other interesting talks, including from Ulrike Fuchs from Asphericon, describing some of the amazing things that can be done with custom-designed aspheres.
The meeting left me with plenty to think and a couple of potential collaborators to follow up with in the New Year. Thanks to the organisers for putting together a varied programme, and for making sure we were all well fed and refreshed with some fantastic food and drink in the lunches, coffee breaks and poster sessions.