Yan Feng

I am in Pisa, Italy right now for Europhoton 2006 conference. In the past two days, there are six summer school lectures. Among them the lecture on “high power fiber lasers” by Almantas Galvanauskas from Michigan University is of most interesting to me.

I learned something new from the lecture. For example, there are so called effective single mode fibers, which basically are multimode fibers but the high order modes are selectively coupled out of the core. It is an attractive way to design large mode area fibers that are desirable for scaling the fiber laser power and also for fiber delivery of narrow band lasers. Another interesting information from the lecture is that some people had demonstrated SBS suppression in a fiber with an acoustic waveguide outside the fiber optical core. This adds a new method on fighting SBS. I will check the technical details when back to work.

The summer school will be followed by a four-day main conference.

It is my second time being in Italy. But this is the first time being in ‘real’ Italy. (In my first visit, I stayed in the northest province, Suedtirol, which is a German speaking region.) I am remindered of China from time to time by somehow chaotic traffic, road sight, and also the size of people (which is similar to Chinese). It may be surpising and difficult to understand. But the feeling is true. There is something similar enough between China and Italy for me, a Chinese living in _Germany_, to be homesick a little bit.