Year of light launch

The United nations has declared 2015 as the International year of light and 80 nations are celebrating light technology, the first official event was the Opening Ceremony held at UNESCO HQ in Paris over 19-20 January 2015. This week Scotland launched its programme with exhibits and talks for schools and the public in the grand surrounds of the Royal Society of Edinburgh which allowed for many exhibits.

The Public event opened with a rendition trumpet recital based on the the Big Bang followed by a word from the sponsors, Professor Paul Hagan of the SFC.

The exhibits ranged from simple experiments, with kits supplied for use at home, to Laser harps with bi-directional "strings".  The harp could be played a note at a time but some fine tuning was still required to play in both directions simultaneously.

While many of the exhibits showed properties of light in demonstrations, others show cased ideas which were either commercial or useful in other research such as biology or medicine.  The use of fluorescence microscopy allows biologists to study microbes and virus's to see how they move, grow and stick to surfaces to allow better sanitisation. While fibre optic microscopy techniques are being developed by researchers at Proteus to enable less invasive exploration of lungs and blood.

There are many laser development companies in Scotland and they were represented by M Squared Lasers who showed off one of their tunable lasers which could be used to discriminate between various white powders.  In a similar vein researchers at St Andrews University have developed a technique of using polymers in fibre optics to act as a "sniffer dog" for explosives and possibly drugs.

The Fraunhoffer stand represented the Centre for Applied Photonics based at Strathcldye University which carriers out research and development which benefits industry and acts as a conduit between the university research department and industry.  The Fraunhofer model was developed in Germany and the company now has centres across the world which allow links with local industry and other centres.

LIGHTPATH was also on display, developed by PhotoSynergy it uses fibre optics to produce a flexible and lightweight rope of light. It has been developed for subsea applications allowing long and flexible lighting for divers working from rigs. It can also be used for emergency lighting and even laid down to form a light path by emergency service crews.

A novel idea was using modulated lighting to transmit data as demonstrated by researchers from the Li-Fi Research and Development Centre. They streamed a video using a LED light as the transmitter so in future we may now longer need wifi boxes and boosters, as lighting will double as the internet carrier.

There were many other excellent examples of the strength of light technology in Scotland and hope for the future for the sector where I carried out research. Indeed I met some old friends who are now leaders in their field and regaled young researchers about the size of lasers in my days and the messy use of liquid dyes which have now been replaced by tiny solid state crystals and reduced to the size of a shoebox.

The closing event will take place on 2nd December 2015 and will be hosted by Heriot-Watt which has a rich history in laser development and light technology throughout the School of Engineering and physical sciences.