As I shared in my January message, one of my priorities this year is to build stronger connections among different areas of our society. Despite the challenges that come with long-distance travel, there is something special about meeting in person that is hard to replicate. Over the years, I have become a seasoned conference attendee and organizer, and I always return home with fresh ideas and new contacts. As I suspect that many of you have found in your own experience, the most valuable insights often come from hallway conversations rather than formal talks. In-depth discussions with speakers after their presentations yield much more insight. Reconnecting with old friends and meeting new ones is good for both my professional and personal well-being. Let me encourage you to attend a meeting in person this year. Take the time to renew an old connection and make a new one as well. These connections are the lifeblood of our field.
I also wrote that we need to improve how we communicate across boundaries—for example, between academia and industry as well as across different technologies. This month, we celebrate a significant milestone for our community: the 50th anniversary of the Optical Fiber Communications Conference and Exhibition (OFC) taking place in San Francisco. OFC exemplifies Optica’s mission of bringing together multiple disciplines in pursuit of advancing the technology of telecommunications. OFC is a premier global event for optical networking and communications, uniting industry leaders, researchers and innovators to exchange ideas and shape the future of the field.
The conference began in 1975, following key breakthroughs in the early 1970s, including room-temperature semiconductor lasers and low-loss optical fibers. The inaugural conference was called Optical Fiber Transmission and was dominated by papers on optical fibers, exploring topics such as phosphosilicate cores, W fibers, dispersion measurements, connectors and early methods for splicing. In comparison, only a few presentations focused on light sources grouped under the session title Devices for Fiber Transmission. These included Raman and miniature Nd:YAG lasers, LEDs and pioneering double heterostructure semiconductor devices.
Today, OFC remains at the forefront of innovation, offering a venue for cutting-edge research, emerging technologies and industry collaborations. To explore its history, you can go back to the OFC Archive and read all the papers from all the past conferences at www.ofcconference.org/home/about/archive.
My personal involvement with fiber optics began in the 1980s, when I built the first commercial fiber/grating pulse compressor and authored a patent for the first diode-pumped single-mode double-clad fiber laser. My diode laser experience is only as a consumer of laser diodes for pumping solid-state lasers. We started with 1 W pumps and have repeatedly been able to design higher-performance lasers as the pump power increased by more than two orders of magnitude. Over the years, I have been constantly amazed at the progress that has been made, both in diodes and optical fibers, from their applications in nonlinear optics, to the delivery of laser beams and of course telecom. I can’t wait to see what the future holds for these technologies.
As we celebrate 50 years of OFC, I invite you to join us in honoring the legacy of innovation and collaboration that characterizes our field and our community.
—Jim Kafka,
Optica President