Lasers

In my undergraduate university days at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario I first started to study about lasers in some third and fourth year optics courses. I continued this interest into graduate school, where I performed experimental work whereby I blasted apart molecules with a high powered Carbon Dioxide laser, and then used a very low powered tunable diode laser to measure concentrations of the chunks of molecules that flew off the original molecule. I measured how quickly these so-called radicals would live for before they recombined with other molecules or the walls of the container that they were in. My M.Sc. thesis was titled “Tunable Diode Laser Diagnostics in Photochemistry”

After my M.Sc. was finished, I was offered a job at a laser conference called CLEO (Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics). The job was too good to turn down, and I ended up moving to Thousand Oaks, California to work at the Rockwell International Science Center. A great job [carefully looked at links, but this second one on ROK is closer. dk], and very productive scientifically. I worked on new science and research and device development in the field of nonlinear optics.

Have a look at my many publications and conference presentations on my CV, fully shown at my site here.  All the details on my laser publications can be found there.

One of my claims to fame was publishing a paper on my development of the world’s first multimode fiber optic gyro. Single mode fiber optic gyros were very common, but never before was a multimode fiber used; maybe never after either? I also worked with leading experts in the field like Pochi Yeh and my group published a paper on using nonlinear optics for image processing that won the highest recognition Rudolf Kingslake Medal and Prize by the SPIE International Society for Optics and Photonics ( I won in 1989. see their website for details).