Making effective and efficient use of outreach resources can be difficult for student groups in smaller rural communities. Washington State University's OSA/SPIE student chapter desires well attended yet cost-effective ways to educate and inform the public. We designed outreach activities focused on three different funding levels: low upfront cost, moderate continuing costs, and high upfront cost with low continuing costs. By featuring our activities at well attended events, such as a pre-football game event, or by advertising a headlining activity, such as a laser maze, we take advantage of large crowds to create a relaxed learning atmosphere. Moreover, participants enjoy casual learning while waiting for a main event. Choosing a particular funding level and associating with well-attended events makes outreach easier. While there are still many challenges to outreach, such as motivating volunteers or designing outreach programs, we hope overcoming two large obstacles will lead to future outreach success.
The maximization of the intrinsic optical nonlinearities of quantum structures for ultrafast applications requires a spectrum scaling as the square of the energy eigenstate number or faster. This is a necessary condition for an intrinsic response approaching the fundamental limits. A second condition is a design generating eigenstates whose ground and lowest excited state probability densities are spatially separated to produce large differences in dipole moments while maintaining a reasonable spatial overlap to produce large off-diagonal transition moments. A structure whose design meets both conditions will necessarily have large first or second hyperpolarizabilities. These two conditions are fundamental heuristics for the design of any nonlinear optical structure.
While sophisticated numerical computational techniques can calculate the hyperpolarizabilities of complex molecules, it is not clear what scale invariant parameters determine a large nonlinear response. We investigate the first and second intrinsic hyperpolarizabilities of one-dimensional power-law potentials with a hybrid analytical semiclassical analysis of energy spectra and numerical calculations of eigenfunctions. By varying the exponent, we determine how key underlying properties drive the nonlinear response as the system smoothly varies from particle in a box, harmonic oscillator, point charge potential, to all multipolar Coulomb potentials. The role of the well-known pathology of the 1/x2 potential is also discussed.
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