spring dst

someone forgot the DST changing of the clocks and woke up a good hour too late for the 10am mass at saint anthony's. tsktsk.

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joyride :)

literally, mikado afternoon :D red brick houses, garden gnomes, occassional chickens and turkeys and goats and cows, rolling green fields, hedges, flower gardens, large glass windows, donkeys!, green doors with knobs in the middle (bag end?), mailboxes by the road, cats sunbathing on windowsills..i could live here!

we spent an afternoon at the photonics innovation center in tollembeek, a quaint little town at the belgian countryside.

b-phot innovation center at Vollezelestraat 46, 1755 Gooik

to get to the b-phot center we would have needed to take the bus from the train station. unfortunately (and fortunately for me :D), the bus only comes once every hour so in order to save time the professor and his assistant picked us up from the station. it was a wonderful 10-minute ride through a beautiful residential area and i was so happy it wasn't cloudy at all the day we went there. sunny or not, though, i am a weakling for joyrides ^^,

prof. jurgen van erps behind the wheel

bunny suits!

the photonics center is right smack in the middle of a residential area and a popular go-to site for cyclists. you do get to wonder why they chose to install their equipment so far from the city and the answer is (1) real estate in brussels is terribly expensive. they needed to build the lab from the foundations itself because it needs to match the specifications of the instruments to be installed. (2) the need to minimize vibrations as the equipments, such as the diamond tooling machine, are sensitive to vibrations. so the laboratory needs to be far from any metro or train stations.

sundo #1

waiting for the train ride back to brussels

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locked-out

crazy day.

not for me but for my room 1-2 neighbor, paulo.

he locked himself out and he was asking if he could climb out my window to his open window two windows down. we're only on the first floor but should he fall he'll get a bunch of broken bones. i would have dared to do it if it was only to climb to the next window, but two windows down and no proper safety precautions? nah. before he went he even gave me a number of his friend, guillermo, who i should call just in case something happens. i even looked up the phone number to the nearest hospital.

and he dared! crazy spanish guy :))

i'm so glad i didn't have to make any calls. whew!

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on-chip mach-zehnder interferometer

i've been studying interferometers for some time now and though i understand why fabry-perot interferometers and ring resonators give a resonance pattern, somehow, i couldn't quite grasp the reasoning behind "resonance" patterns in mach-zehnder interferometers. in other words, what my question really is IS, unlike FP and ring resonators, light doesn't get coupled back into an MZI, so how does it even produce resonance?

in the end i realized i have been trying to understand the "resonance" graph all wrong. first of all, it would be wrong to describe the graph above as "resonances" as you can see dips instead of resonances but the previous TA always uses the term "resonance" which probably added to my confusion. the graph above, in fact, does not show resonance peaks but rather interference.

so, basically, the dips in the wavelength vs attenuation graph above shows the wavelengths at which destructive interference occurs due to the difference in arm length of the interferometer. changing the arm length difference results in (wavelength shift or FSR change?). furthermore, as can be easily noticed, the graph (regardless of the dips) does not follow a straight line. in fact, it is relatively bent with a minimum value of about 12dBm at 1540nm. this bending is due to the attenuation of the waveguide itself which shows it has been optimized for 1540nm use.

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coca-cola

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