Physics

ITMO University occupies several prominent buildings in the centre of St. Petersburg. But residents and guests alike rarely get a chance to take a look at what’s happening inside them. Articles featured in this digest will take you on a virtual tour of our labs, as well as shed some light on the work underway within our walls.

Now I will show what doctors usually never show to patients. More precisely, it shows everything in the form of a beautiful render, from which it does not follow at all that a piece of metal will stick up in your cornea for a couple of minutes. Fortunately, you will not feel this because of the anesthetic premedication, you will not know and do not remember, because the piece of iron will be out of focus.



So, watch the video, and I will show the frames with comments. This is a real operation on a patient in a German clinic, the recording was made on a device like the “black box” of the VisuMAX device. In this case, the patient has agreed to use the recording for training purposes, usually access to such records is strictly limited.

The idea — to take and cut a lens in a transparent cornea — is not new. At first it was done manually, with a scalpel directly on the surface (difficult and very rough, with a sea of side effects). The first laser was used in 1979, then it was a pulsed infrared emitter with an effective pulse length of 4 nanoseconds.


Step 1: creating a plasma bubble, in fact — a microburst. Step 2: expansion of the shock and heat waves. Step 3: cavitation bubble (plasma expansion). Step 4: the formation of a parallel slice at the expense of several adjacent laser focus points.

One of our previous articles featured an overview of our photonics department students’ work lives. Today we’re going to expand on this topic by looking at four related MA programs: “Light Guide Photonics and Programmable Electronics”, “LED technologies and optoelectronics”, “Photonic materials” and “Laser technologies”. We sat down with some of the folks currently enrolled in these programs, as well as recent graduates, to talk about the role ITMO University played in kickstarting their careers.

In life we often face the challenge of choosing the right colors. This happens when we need to choose clothes suitable for each other, shoes suitable for clothes, choose different wallpapers for the children's room, makeup, choose colors for our site and much more. The process of selecting several colors that combine with each other is called the construction of a color palette (gamut).

In colouristics there are several methods for constructing a color palette (color gamma) based on the arrangement of colors relative to each other in the color circle and, usually, having the same brightness. Harmonious perception of which is not sufficiently substantiated from the physical point of view.

The wave method of building color palette based on the relationship of color and acoustic waves, and also the concept of consonance (harmony) in music theory. Below is a more detailed description of the method.

This site allows you to choose the most harmonious combination of colors for your site, clothing, interior, etc.

The corresponding article was published on the site arxiv.org — https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.04752. Results are available on our site — wavepalette.com.

In one of our previous articles, we took you on a tour of the university’s optoelectronics lab. This time around we’ve got something more public, but no less exciting in mind: The Optics Museum.

Bandwidth warning: lots of photos below!

Today we’re taking a look at the Functional Materials and Devices of Optoelectronics Lab at ITMO University, the equipment it houses, and the projects underway at the facility. It is an international research facility located in the center of St. Petersburg. The staff is primarily occupied with the search for innovative materials (semiconductors, metals, and nanostructured oxides), and the manufacturing of next-gen micro- and optoelectronic gadgets. Here we take a look at the high-tech equipment it utilizes.

Master’s degrees are really useful. Postgrad education allows BA holders to put their new-found skills into practice, and secure great jobs further down the road. But students often need help assessing this choice, particularly if they majored in uncommon subjects — like photonics.

To set the record straight, we talked to the people behind, and the graduates of our MA programs in photonics and optical computing. In this article you’ll learn about part-time work available for photonics students, graduates’ job-hunting prospects, and the academic career options that open up.

Annotation. This article gives an analogy between the forces of nature and various types of money. A justification for the "money conservation laws" is made. Explanation of the IT-money phenomenon by analogy to physics laws is given, as well as gold and currency money. The transition from the gold and currency to the gold-currency-computing economy is considered. A reasonable assumption is made that the fourth type of money after gold, securities and IT money will be so-called "citation indices" or "ratings", which are similar in their properties to stock indices.

This article is an attempt to understand what money is from the physics and econophysics points of view. Econophysics (economics and physics) is an interdisciplinary research field, applying theories and methods originally developed by physicists to solve problems in economics, usually those including uncertainty or stochastic processes, nonlinear dynamics and evolutionary games.

Warning First, all the objects and theories described in this article have the status of hypothetical at the moment. That is, the holographic hypothesis and string theories have not been experimentally confirmed many.Second, a fundamentally new type of mechanical gyroscope with six degrees of freedom is proposed for experimental verification (base) of hypotheses. Of the two and three degrees of freedom mechanical gyroscopes known to science, this is the last of the possible types with the maximum number of degrees of freedom in the holonomic system (GYRO_6DoF).Third, with the advent of the experimental base — the tops of the physical pyramid, string theories, and the holographic hypothesis, which is actually the foundation of the future Theory of Everything, are temporarily removed from criticism until the moment of practical implementation of the experiment and measurements.Abstract Even people far from physics know that the maximum possible data transmission rate of any signal is equal to the speed of light in a vacuum. It is denoted by the letter «c», and this is about 300 thousand kilometers per second. The speed of light in a vacuum is one of the fundamental physical constants. The impossibility of achieving speeds exceeding the speed of light in three-dimensional space is a deduction from Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (SRT). Usually, when it is argued that SRT prohibits the transmission of the information above the speed of light, an implicit assumption is made that there is no other way other than to «bind information» to a photon and transmit it. However, there is another way. The well-known physical hypothesis — the Holographic Principle (a modern and widely used tool in theoretical physics) points to an interesting phenomenon: “Phenomena taking place in three-dimensional space can be projected onto a remote screen without losing information” — Leonard Susskind “The World as a Hologram ”[p. 3].

It would seem that the question of the color of the Moon and the Sun from space for modern science is so simple that in our century there should be no problem at all with the answer. We are talking about colors when observing precisely from space, since the atmosphere causes a color change due to Rayleigh light scattering. «Surely somewhere in the encyclopedia about this in detail, in numbers it has long been written,» you will say. Well, now try searching the Internet for information about it. Happened? Most likely no. The maximum that you will find is a couple of words about the fact that the Moon has a brownish tint, and the Sun is reddish. But you will not find information about whether these tints are visible to the human eye or not, especially the meanings of colors in RGB or at least color temperatures. But you will find a bunch of photos and videos where the Moon from space is absolutely gray, mostly in photos of the American Apollo program, and where the Sun from space is depicted white and even blue.

Especially my personal opinion is nothing but a consequence of the intervention of politics in science. After all, the colors of the Moon and the Sun from space directly relate to the flights of Americans to the Moon.

I searched through many scientific articles and books in search of information about the color of the Moon and the Sun from space. Fortunately, it turned out that even though they do not have a direct answer to RGB, there is complete information about the spectral density of the solar radiation and the reflectivity of the Moon across the spectrum. This is quite enough to get accurate colors in RGB values. You just need to carefully calculate what, in fact, I did. In this article I will share the results of calculations with you and, of course, I will tell you in detail about the calculations themselves. And you will see the Moon and the Sun from space in real colors!

Somewhere in an alternative Universe, based on MWI, I became a genius in physics. But in our Universe, I just read professional publications in physics, trying to keep myself up to date, meanwhile working as pizza delivery guy as DBA. Because of a slightly deeper knowledge of the subject it is almost impossible for me to watch the Discovery channel and other popular TV shows and the YouTube videos. I see nothing but oversimplifications, lies, and half-truths and can’t enjoy the shows.

I decided to compile a list of the most popular misconceptions. And the winner is...., or course, this one:

The Big Bang

Usually it is pictured like this: