JPL meetings and an invited talk in Long Beach
Harald Schwefel visited NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena on 27 July 2026, meeting Andrey Matsko, Subash Khanal and Luis Millán.
JPL matters to Tuwhiri twice over. It is the home of the Aura Microwave Limb Sounder whose record the programme exists to continue, and it is where several of our advisors work on the resonator physics the instrument depends on. Sitting down with people who have operated a limb sounder for two decades is the fastest way to learn which problems are real and which only look hard from the outside.
Subash Khanal is co-applicant on the Catalyst: Seeding project that formalises this collaboration, so the visit also allowed time for working on that.
The visit coincided with the Optica Advanced Photonics Congress in Long Beach, California, where Harald gave an invited talk at the Nonlinear Photonics topical meeting. Nonlinear Photonics covers exactly the ground the instrument occupies — nonlinear optical materials, frequency conversion and resonator systems — and it is one of the better venues for putting the up-conversion approach in front of the community that would recognise its limits.
Harald Schwefel is a Professor in the Physics Department of the University of Otago and Science Lead of Tuwhiri. He is also the Deputy Director Science in Te Whai Ao – Dodd-Walls Centre for Photonic and Quantum Technologies and Principal Investigator in Quantum Technologies Aotearoa (QTA).
His research interests are in the use of optical resonators. Such high-quality resonators are great to generate very high field intensities. With high fields the interaction of light with matter can show significant nonlinearities and light can interact with itself and new colours can be created. A side effect of these high-quality resonators is that they are extremely sensitive to changes in the environment making them an ideal candidate to measure such changes.