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1. Elected Officers President: Osamu Takayama osamu.takayama@icfo.es #3185166 Vice-President: Giorgio Volpe giorgio.volpe@icfo.es #3144627 Secretary: Lars Neumann lars.neumann@icfo.es #3213429 Treasurer: Sandro Perrone sandro.perrone@icfo.es #3144632

2. Current Chapter Members: Naeimeh Behbood Rafael Betancur Lopera Kavita Devi Petru Ghenuche Dhriti Ghosh Jan Gieseler Jorge Herrera-Ramirez Omid Kokabee Anna Kubasiak Saurabh Raj Osamu Takayama Reddeppa Thanneeru Domenico Tulli Giorgio Volpe Can Yao

3. Current Activities (August 2008 – August 2009)

3.1 Weekly Seminar The members of ICFO-SPIE student chapters organize a series of seminar every Wednesday at our home institute, ICFO-The Institute of Photonic Sciences. The speakers are mainly PhD Students and Post-doc researchers, as well as undergraduate students, as professors at ICFO, and visitors. To encourage people to attend the seminar some drinks and snacks are also offered. This series of seminars provides a good opportunity for the chapter members to practice their communication and public speaking skills in front of a friendly audience, and to enhance information exchange between members and to broaden the members' knowledge in different fields of optics. 29. July 2009 Omjyoti Dutta Unconventional Superconductivity in Bose-Fermi Mixtures

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22. July 2009 Tong Lai Chen Novel TiO2 based transparent conductive oxide thin films 15. July 2009 Peyman Zirak Photodynamics Study of Some BLUF Proteins 17. June 2009 Gabriele Anzolin Photonics Meets Astronomy 10. June 2009 Mehmet Süzen Induced Charge Computation 03. June 2009 Srdjan Acimovic Detecting Low Molecular Concentrations with Engineered Surface Plasmon Nanostructures 27. May 2009 Salvatore Minissale Optical Properties of Er in Si 20. May 2009 Ritwick Das Nonlinear Bragg Reflection Waveguides for Broad Bandwidth Applications 13. May 2009 Fernando Cucchietti Quantum Simulations of Critical Phenomena 06. May 2009 Turgut Durduran Probing Tissues with Near-Infrared Light 29. April 2009 Osamu Takayama Observation of Dyakonov Surface Waves 22. April 2009 Alessandro Cerè Narrowband Quantum Light Generation

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15. April 2009 Arnaud Gardelein Quantum Transceiver for Space Communications 08. April 2009 Chistopher Hadley Resources for Measurement-Based Quantum Computation 25. March 2009 Omid Kokabee GHz femtosecond Optical Parametric Oscillator pumped by 76-MHz Ti:Sapphire Laser 18. March 2009 Francisco Rodríguez Second-Harmonic Generation beyond the Dipolar Approximation 11. March 2009 Pietro Massignan Topological Quantum Computation with Ultracold Atoms 04. March 2009 Luat Vuong Geometric Phase and Angular Momentum Switching between Vortex Beams 11. February 2009 Daniele Faccio Laser Pulse Filamentation: from Self-Compression to Black-Hole Analogies 04. February 2009 Reuven Gordon Sensing and Spectroscopy using Nanostructured Metal Films 28. January 2009 Clara Inés Osorio Measuring the spatio-temporal purity of a single photon using a two photon interferometer 21. January 2009 Dhriti Ghosh Ultrathin Metal Films for Optoelectronics Industry 14. January 2009 Mathieu Juan Near Field Photochemical Imaging

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17. December 2008 Martin Hendrych Shaping the spectrum of entangled photons 10. December 2008 Filip Beunis Electrical charges in nonpolar liquids 03. December 2008 Satish Rao A view on mechanically induced transitions in living cells using Raman tweezers 26. November 2008 Joaquim Puigdollers Research on photovoltaic devices at Micro and Nanotechnology Group (MNT_UPC) 19. November 2008 Gerard Nienhuis Vortices and Mode Stability in Astigmatic and Rotating Resonators 12. November 2008 Sotiris Psilodimitrakopoulos Polarization sensitive second harmonic generation microscopy, a new contrast mechanism in high resolution biological/biomedical imaging. 05. November 2008 Omjyoti Dutta Stability of Dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates. 29. October 2008 Ulrich Ebling Links between cold gases and liquid crystals 22. October 2008 Philip Bates OPCPA, from attoseconds to petawatts 15. October 2008 Simò Graells Growth of plasmonic nanostructures by FEBIT 08. October 2008 Domenico Tulli Ultra performing micro-structured modulators in LiNbO3

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01. October 2008 Guillaume Baffou Heating of plasmonic nanostructures 17. September 2008 David McCloskey Convective forces in optical trapping of microspheres

3.2 El Día de la Luz (The Day of Light)

‘El Día de la Luz,’ the day of light in Spanish, is our educational outreach activities to teach basics of optics to mainly local high school students. We visit local high schools and also invite high school students and teachers to our institute to introduce optics to the students through presentations and demonstrations with every day examples of optics. By attending the program, students learn basic concepts such as polarization, wavelength, color, stereoscopic vision, reflection and refraction in connection to everyday experiences based on applications of optics. In one of these sessions, students are also familiarized with geometrical optics with telescopes, periscopes, and energy conversion of light with solar cell, plasma ball. 1). ETOP 2009 (5-7, July 2009) Our outreach activities, El Día de la Luz was presented in the conference, ETOP-Education and Training in Optics and Photonics, held in North Wales, UK: (http://www.etop.org.uk/home.php?page_id=11) as: S. Chaitanya Kumar, Manoj Mathew, Giorgio Volpe, Osamu Takayama, Alejandra Valencia, ‘The Day of the Light – Optics demonstration for high school students,’ Paper: 1.4.41. 2). IES Castellar i Puig de la Creu (April 22, 2009) 40 students and a teacher from IES Castellar i Puig de la Creu in Barcelona visited ICFO to participate in the event. 8 volunteers from the chapter participated in the organization of the event. 3). Escaan International School at Sitges (April 17, 2009) This time 5 volunteers, and the special participation of Prof. Lukas Novotny, ICFO visiting professor from the University of Rochester, New York (USA), visited Escaan Internatinoal School in Sitges to share the passion of learning about photonics with elementary school students.

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(Left)Prof. Novotny captured the attention of the children with an introductory talk. (Right) One of the member Saurabh Raj continued the introductory presentation.

(Left and Right) Students enjoy playing with plasma ball.

(Left) Students learn refraction and reflection of light with laser and hemi cylindrical containers with liquid. (Right) With 3D glasses students enjoy 3D images and how stereoscopic vision works.

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4). ICFO Management and Engineering Units (December 9, 2008) The members of ICFO- chapters held a hand-on workshop in optics for 20 people in management and engineering units of our institute, ICFO. The participants went through series of hand-on experiment to take a tiny tastes of photonics research being conducted in laboratories of ICFO.

3.3. Fascination of Light (November 12 – December 3, 2009) We participated in 'Fascination of Light' during 3 weeks. Fascination of Light is an educational outreach event supported by European Commission and consortium to provide general public with hands-on experience regarding light in order to promote public awarness of light and its technology(http://www.fascination-of-light.net/). The participants play with 40 different very visual, enjoyable hands-on demonstration of light, including lasers, plasma ball, polarizers, radiometer and so on. We received over 1300 visitors during 3 weeks from local elementary, junior high, high school as well as the general public the general public.

Photos during ‘Fascination of Light.’ 3.4 Open day of ICFO/Lab tour 1). High school teachers' visit to ICFO (May 8, 2009) Around 15 high school teachers from various high schools in Barcelona area visited ICFO to see the center of excellence in photonics in Catalunya. We organized the welcome session with ICFO’s the Knowledge and Technology Transfer (KTT) director, Silvia Carrasco, and laboratory tour in the institute. 2). Students from University of Leiden visit ICFO (May 4, 2009) 40 students from the student union in the University of Leiden, Netherland, visited ICFO as a part of their study trip to Spain. In order to show the research in the institute, we had a presentation about 'quantum information theory' from Prof. Antonio Acín, a group leader in ICFO. Later on, we organized a lab tour for the visitors to show 3 research

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groups in ICFO, that is, Molecular nanophotonics group by Prof. Niek van Hulst, Optoelectronics group by Prof. Valerio Pruneri, and Optical tweezers group by Prof. Dmitri Petrov. Among these activities we organized, we requested the funding for 3.1 Weekly Seminars 3.2 El Día de la Luz 3.4 Open day of ICFO/Lab tour. *Note that the expense for ‘3.3 Fascination of Light’ was covered by organizers. The funding was spent in the following manner: 3.1 Weekly seminars $350: Refreshments (chips, cookies, drinks) 3.2 El día de la Luz 1). ETOP 2009 (5-7, July 2009) $520: Accommodation $250: Flight $200: Train and taxi $290: Registration $150: Food Total $ 1410 3). Escaan International School at Sitges (April 17, 2009) $60: Transportation (renting a car) $5: Batteries for 3.2 El Día de la Luz 3.4 Open day of ICFO/Lab tour. 2). Students from University of Leiden visit ICFO (May 4, 2009) $50 Total expence: $1975

4. Upcoming Events 1). September: ICONS Coffee Session. Round table meeting with coffee and snack and an industrial researcher and manager from Merck. In this relaxed atmosphere, PhD students are encouraged to use this opportunity to learn more about their possible career paths. 2). September: International Food Day. Researchers cook together the local cousin of their respective home countries. This event connects the institute's researchers and also works as an advertisement/recruitment platform for the student chapter.

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3). October: Officers' Election for the new term 4). From October onwards: Local Outreach Programme.

5. Financial information. Beginning balance $700 from Annual SPIE grant for 2008 $1000 from SPIE outreach grant $1700 from ICFO Total $3400 Expense $1975 for activities as explained above. Ending balance $3400 – $1975 = $1425