Optics and photonics are technical enablers for many areas of the economy, and dramatic technical advances have had a major impact on daily life. For example, in the last decade, advances in optical fiber communications have permitted a nearly 100-fold increase in the amount of information that can be transmitted from place to place, enabling a societytransforming Internet to thrive. As noted in the introduction to Charles Kao’s 2009 Nobel Prize lecture on his work in optical fiber communications, “the work has fundamentally transformed the way we live our daily lives.”1 Indeed, optical fiber communications have enabled what Thomas Friedman has called a “flat world.”2 Without optics,.
