Allen HJ Yang

I’ve added a new page to the website!  On the new outreach page there is a link to a flash game that Jesse Zhang and me made that tries to recreate the optical tweezer in flash. There is a spherical cow joke included. The link to that page is here. Try it out!

It’s amazing what you can find on the web if you look hard enough. Today’s find is some kind of podcast of what sounds like a radio show, and as part of this show they play a little game called “Win those tweezers”, styled after the TV game show “Who wants to be a millionaire”. The first question… is about us!!! This segment starts about a minute into the video, and I’ve embedded it below:

“who wants to be a millionaire” Afternoon Drive - Win Those Tweezers!!!!! with Jim Shea

Their choices are:

A.) A tractor beam that can move microscopic particles (The right answer)

B.) A phaser that can stun human beings

C.) Transport a cube of sugar a distance of 0.001 cm

D.) Read better on airplanes

No one picked A… can’t blame them though, I wish I could build a phaser for stunning other people. Teleporting would be cool if I could figure out a way to do it for more than 0.001 cm

I’ll put a post up later about some science that wasn’t done by us, but this was just too cool and funny to pass up posting

Yeah, I’m yoinking the segment from Colbert, but he’s got a good idea.

Tip of my hat to Bio Optics World. At some point there was a laser focus world blurb on the stability analysis paper, which got published, but never really showed up anywhere I saw. Today, I found this article that cites that article and talks about the paper. So, definitely very cool.

*snark* Which brings me to, Wag of my finger to… Bio Optics World. While they did talk about the paper, I had to scroll to the bottom of the page to find the blurb about the stability stuff. Really, Bio Optics World? Bottom of the page? Thanks… obviously blurbs about finding causes to transplant deaths and raman spectroscopy are SOOO much more deserving of those precious top slots on your webpage */snark*

Actually… that stuff is pretty cool. You’re forgiven Bio Optics World… this time. Here is the link to that page:

Bio Optics World

The fourth blurb in that article is actually REALLY cool. These scientists developed something called, “Optical Comb Spectroscopy”. No details on how it works or any links to science journals, but evidently it can analyze the composition of breath samples. Some quick google searching finds an article that describes the optical comb aspect. The breath sample sits in the space between two mirrors and pulsed laser light is bounced back and forth in that cavity, a lot, such that the light pretty much has a chance to interact with every molecule in the cavity (which includes the ones in your breath). Thus, the spectrum of light that comes out will show the results of those interactions.

Idea makes a lot of sense, and I can certainly see how it would work. Perhaps now breathalyzers can be used to detect more than just how many beers I’ve had in the last few hours.

Sorry I’ve been AWOL for a while. Been pretty busy with research. I’ve updated the publication page with pdf files for all the papers in the refereed papers section.

Now that I’ve got a bit more time to myself, I’ll take the time to update the research page to be more accessible, and definitely dial down the jargon in there. Can barely understand what I wrote there myself.

When light hits an object, one of three things can happen to it.

Light can be reflected, where it bounces off at the same angle that you hit it at. A mirror is an object that bounces off most of the light that hits it and is the source of its reflective nature.

A quick experiment that you can do is to take a flashlight and point it directly at a mirror. If you did this right, you probably got blinded a bit. The light is bouncing straight back into your eyes. Now, move a bit to the left, but point your flashlight straight out from your body towards the point you were aiming at before. The light from your flashlight will appear to light up a place that is not the mirror you are pointing it at. As you keep moving to the left while aiming at the same point on the mirror, the spot reflecting back from the mirror should be moving away from you. That is because mirror is reflecting the light at the SAME angle you are hitting it at. So, the wider the angle that light hits a mirror, the farther away from its starting point it will end up.

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Thanks for stopping by. I just started the webpage, so its not quite *polished* yet, but I hope that you will check out the page and come back to see any new updates I will make to the page. I hope to spend some time blogging about my own research and about others who work in my area, so there should be a nice influx of new material to the page for a while to come.