Summer Is Here: Time To Go To A Conference

Well I’ve scrounged up enough money to go to this conference. Though I can not attend the full 3 days. Actually I’ve paid for three days just can not afford to take the full 3 days off of work. I should be about to attend 1/2 the presentations. Some of the stuff looks super interesting. Sadly, my experience is that even if the topic is ultra cool, you end up with some super nerd who has no presentation skills or a foreign accent so thick you need a translator for his/her English. Having said that I love going to these things. You meet some of the most interesting people working on seriously cutting edge stuff.

Sessions below I attended. For a full list of sessions please check the ANTEM/AMEREM website.

UPDATE: Well this was a great conference with sessions from image and signal processing for medical use to how to use cell phone antennas to find people in nearby buildings. I wish I could talk to more of the participants, it is alway hard for me to find a way to break the ice with people I don’t know.


14th International Symposium on Antenna Technology and Applied Electromagnetics [ANTEM] and the American Electromagnetics Conference [AMEREM]

The Program:

TA2: ANTEM Small Tunable Antennas and New Materials; [Organized Session]Tuesday, July 6th, MacDonald
TA5: UWB Noise Radar Applications in Homeland Security [Organized Session]; Tuesday, July 6th, Laurier Room
TA7: ANTEM Arrays and Leaky Wave Antennae; Tuesday, July 6th, Renaissance
TP9: ANTEM Antennas for Space Applications [Organized Session]; Tuesday, July 6th, MacDonald
TP10: ANTEM Sensors; Tuesday, July 6th, L’Orangerie
TP13: UWB Radar Systems and Signal Processing; Tuesday, July 6th, Drawing Room
TP14: ANTEM Bioelectromagnetics; Tuesday, July 6th, MacDonald
TP16: HPEM Electromagnetic Compatibility; Tuesday, July 6th, Burgundy
WA18: ANTEM Reflectarray Antennas [Organized Session]; Wednesday, July 7th, Renaissance
WA19: ANTEM Recent Developments on Earth-Space Propagation Research Applied to Satellite Communications [Organized Session]; Wednesday, July 7th, MacDonald
WA24: HPEM Antennas; Wednesday, July 7th, Burgundy
WP25: ANTEM Antenna Theory & Design I; Wednesday, July 7th, Renaissance
WP26: ANTEM Antennas for GPS/GNSS Applications [Organized Session]; Wednesday, July 7th, MacDonald
WP28: UWB Sensing Through Walls [Organized Session]; Wednesday, July 7th, Burgundy
WP29: HPEM Threats, Coupling Effects, Protection and Standards II [Organized Session]; Wednesday, July 7th, Laurier Room
TA33: ANTEM UWB Antennas and Systems II; Thursday, July 8th, Renaissance
TA34: ANTEM Microwave Devices and Circuits; Thursday, July 8th, MacDonald
TA36: UXO, Landmine, IED Detection I; Thursday, July 8th, Burgundy
TA37: UWB Antennas, Radiation and Propagation; Thursday, July 8th, Laurier Room
TA39: ANTEM EMI/EMC; Thursday, July 8th, Renaissance
TP40: ANTEM Artificial Dielectrics & Electromagnetic Bandgap Structures [Organized Session]; Thursday, July 8th, Renaissance
TP42: ANTEM Microstrip Integrated and Active Antennas; Thursday, July 8th, L’Orangerie
TP43: UXO, Landmine, IED Detection II; Thursday, July 8th, Burgundy
TP44: UWB Target Detection, Discrimination & Imaging; Thursday, July 8th, Laurier Room
TP45: HPEM Threats, Coupling Effects, Protection and Standards I [Organized Session]; Thursday, July 8th, Drawing Room
TP46: ANTEM Microwave and Millimeter Wave Antennas; Thursday, July 8th, L’Orangerie
TP48: UWB Communication [Organized Session]; Thursday, July 8th, Laurier Room

Canada Plays a Key Role in Two New Cosmic Origins Missions

Found this a couple of minutes ago. It is a news release about Canada’s involvement in two new astronomy missions in space.

Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory and Planck space telescope were successfully launched simultaneously at 9:12 a.m. Eastern today aboard the same Ariane 5 rocket from Kourou, French Guiana. With funding from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), four Canadian science teams made important contributions to both satellites, considered to be two of the most ambitious missions seeking to better understand the birth of stars and the dawn of the Universe. While the Herschel and Planck satellites are two separate missions, both contribute to enhance their respective research areas in far-infrared astronomy and cosmology.

Adaptive optics using multiple laser guide stars

There is a great article on the SPIE website by Christoph Baranec about the about new method to improve adaptive optics using multiple laser guide stars Adaptive optics work by canceling out the effects of air turbulence.

We have shown that the MMT’s laser-GLAO system reduces the atmosphere’s blurring effects over wide fields of view, demonstrating the reduction of stellar image widths by as much as 53% in the near-IR, and uniform correction over a 110 arcsecond field of view.

Check it out it is a good read.

Coolly Extreme – Magnetars

Illustration of a Magnetar, Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss
Illustration of a Magnetar, Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss
At the AAS meeting in 2009 there was presentation by Denis Leahy who offered a possible explanation for the strong magnetic fields produced by an extreme object called a magnetar.  A magnetar is a type of neutron star that has a very fast rotation rate and are extremely magnetic.  These objects are born from the death of a star in a supernova and manage to preserve the magnetic field and angular momentum of the parent star.  So where do these strong magnetic fields come from?  According the Denis Leahy, they are caused by a theoretical star called a quark star.  These are neutron stars that are further compressed by gravity. These stars  “overwhelm the structure of the neutron degenerate matter, quark matter (or strange matter)”.   According to Leahy 1 in 10 supernova should result in a magnetar.

As with a lot of other astrophysics enthusiasts I love those things that are at the extremes of our fields of interest.  I’ve been following the evolution of magnetar research since I first read of them in Sky and Tel many, many moons ago.

For me magnetars rank right up there with black holes in there extreme coolness factor.  A quick search of produces 25 hits when the work magnetar is used and using the Digital Library for Physics and Astronomy produces over 200 hits.  Clearly a keen area of research.

source: Universe Today

Another current piece of research on magnetars is being conducted by astronomers from SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research have used the NTEGRAL and XMM-Newton of ESA and the NASA satellite RXTE to discover that magnetars can produce very strong x-ray pulses.  This according to Peter den Hartog of the SRON in the Netherlands.  Magnetars are interesting because they’re stars about  1  1/2 the size of our sun, squeezed into a sphere 10 kilometres in diameter.  How they form exactly is a mystery.  Magnetars can emit enormous quantities of energy in the form of X-rays, they have a lifespan of only 10,000 years.

‘By converting the observations from INTEGRAL, XMM-Newton and RXTE into a type of short film, we could see how the characteristics of the X-rays changed over the course of time,’ explains Den Hartog. The characteristics of the radiation were found to drastically change during the rotation of the magnetar. Den Hartog: ‘Three different processes were found to be taking place in the magnetar that gave rise to three different pulses.’

source:  Science Centric