Happy New Year 2003!

The 2002 LEOS Annual Meeting was held in November, 2002, in Glasgow Scotland.

To bring the Annual Meeting to all LEOS members, this issue presents plenary talks on “New Age Fiber Crystals” by Prof. Philip Russell at the University of Bath, “Advances in Vertical-Cavity and Widely-Tunable Lasers using InP-based PIC Technology” by Prof. Larry Coldren of the University of California, Santa Barbara, “The Future of Optical Communications,” by Dr. Shigeyuki Akiba of KDDI Submarine Cable Systems Inc, Japan, and “Optical Sciences in Scotland,” by Prof. John Marsh of the University of Glasgow.

In this issue, the Newsletter is also launching the first installment of a new Career Section. The purpose of the Career Section is to help promote the careers and scientific achievements of our LEOS members. In this issue, the Career Section highlights achievements of this year’s LEOS Graduate Student Fellows and features an article from the IEEE Professional Communications Society entitled “Some boosts for your career” by Joseph A. Robinson. We thank the PCS Society for allowing us to reprint this article for our LEOS members.

Our lead article commemorates the development of “The Diode Laser - the First Thirty Days Forty Years Ago” by Prof. Russell Dupuis, who is the Judson S. Swearingen Regents Chair in Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. This article provides a fascinating view of events surrounding the development of the injection laser over 40 years ago.

Our first Hot Topic features research on “Active Photonic Integrated Circuit Components Based on Semiconductor Microdisk Resonators” by P. D. Dapkus, Kostadin Djordiev, Seung-June Choi, and Sang-Jun Choi of the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Prof. P. Daniel Dapkus is presently the W. M. Keck Professor of Engineering. For more information, see his group’s website for the Compound Semiconductor Laboratory at: http://www.csl.usc.edu/Dapkus/dapkus.html.

The second Hot Topic describes the development of a “Low-Drive-Voltage LiNbO3 40-Gb/s modulator” by Masaki Sugiyama, Masaharu Doi, Shinji Taniguchi, (all Researchers), Tadao Nakazawa (Senior Researcher), and Hiroshi Onaka (Director) at the Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd in Japan. For more information, see the Fujitsu website at: http://www.labs.fujitsu.com/en.

Please feel free to suggest comments and suggestions to improve the Newsletter and to submit articles for the “Hot Topics” and “Feature” sections: myl@us.ibm.com.