Belated post: Us at the 32nd Samahang Pisika ng Pilipinas Physics Congress

Every year, the Samahang Pisika ng Pilipinas holds a physics congress that features scientific research from different institutions in the Philippines.

This year the physics congress was held at the National Institute of Physics from October 17 to 20. A total of 120 papers were accepted for presentation. There were also 14 invited talks from leading scientists here and from abroad.

The SPP Congress group photo. Courtesy: http://www.spp-online.org/.

Our group is fortunate to present two papers if you consider that the group was only formed two months prior the submission deadline.

Nestor Bareza, Jr or Tor,  introduces how spatial mode projection can be used to determine the size of a cylindrical nanoscale object (click here for the extended abstract).  In his talk, he describes how to exploit tailored light beams to increase the resolution sensitivity for detecting reflected signals from very tiny objects and how to obtain the spatial characteristics of these objects. One thing we realized is that for two dimensional objects, two or more modes in sequential measurements might be needed to separately obtain the dimensions as these dimensions are seen to be coupled in the intensity expression.  This work extends one of my research in ICFO (click here or here for the paper).

Our second presentation came from my students from the Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP). They interned at the Photonics Research Laboratory last April – May and they were looking for an external adviser to help them with their undergraduate thesis. I was there and at that time without a student so go figure.

SPP Poster of Mayilyn Bondoc and Jobenn Sabanal.

Mayvilyn Bondoc and Jobenn Sabanal, in their poster (click here for the extended abstract), report a modification of the phase of a Bessel-beam so that the beam’s trajectory can be deflected and/or curved in a controlled manner. A controllable beam path is very appealing because it opens up a lot of applications for these beams. Below is the poster that they presented.

I am looking forward to the next SPP Physics Congress in Vigan, Ilocos Sur. I hope the group will have more papers in the succeeding years.