You are invited to attend this seminar hosted by Andy Weiner and Peter Bermel. Refreshments will be provided. Femtosecond Optics: More Than Just Really Fast" ECE Distinguished Seminar November 13, 2012 Burton D. Morgan Center, ROOM 121 3:30 PM Erich P. Ippen Elihu Thomson Professor of Electrical Engineering and Professor of Physics, Emeritus" Massachusetts Institute of Technology Research Laboratory of Electronics Advances in ultrafast optics have created dramatic new capabilities for a variety of applications, such as optical clocks, medical imaging, micro-machining, precision sampling, and signal processing, as well as for a wide range of scientific investigations. Many of these applications do not themselves rely on ultrafast time resolution, but benefit from the ultrawide bandwidths, low temporal coherence, low noise or high peak powers of ultrashort light pulses. This talk will describe briefly the femtosecond laser state-of-the-art that makes these things possible, and will illustrate how it enables such a wide range of uses.