The 12, 12, 12, 3, 3, 3 gateway human whiteout merging timelines, earthquakes, erupting volcanoes, the upcoming solstice and more on this month's Mid-Month Energy Report for Patreon. So good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you may be across the planet around the world. My name is Greg Prescott from n5d.com and you're tuned into another episode of our Patreon Mid-Month Energy Report for December 2019. Now what I've been doing is I've been posting the first part of this energy report on YouTube and that's what I'm doing right now. So got a lot of things I want to cover but first started making some more t-shirts and since the last time this is something new. We have ladies fitted t-shirts as you can see it kind of cuts in, goes out, it's more form fitted for the ladies. This one's an iced dye, came out beautiful and here's another iced dye that came out for a ladies t-shirt and then the unisex ones got this style. My daughter came up with these color combinations. I loved it when she put it together. She was down here the last five days and she put the burgundy with the yellow and you end up getting the pinks and the oranges that go along with it. So I've got several sizes in that along with here's another ladies cotton candy colored tie dye. So what's going on is I've actually had a Christmas special going on where you can get five dollars off any shirt just use the code right here M4UZMTR4 at n5d.net and that's five dollars off any shirt. I believe it's until the 20th of this month and that includes shirts that are on sale. So let's get into it. The first thing I'd like to talk about is the Shuman Whiteout. So let me go to this page right here. So let's go back because this all ties in with one another. If you look here this was on 1212 during the 1212 Gateway. We had two whiteouts that happened on the Shuman. So I'm wondering how did you guys feel during the 1212 Gateway? Did you feel like there was a lot of energy coming in? Did you not feel anything at all? Were you wiped out? Did you experience light symptoms or heavy symptoms? A lot of people I'm reading everything across the board right now and everybody's going to take it differently. So I'm really curious how you guys felt on the 121212 slash 333 Gateway comment below right there. As you can see the following day there were two more whiteouts. Now if you look at the time between these on the 12th there were several hours in between these two whiteouts and then perhaps a quickening that was going on where they were pretty close together. Also look at the pattern that's going on here. Is it possible now for those who have been following the Shuman Resonance we haven't seen this many whiteouts especially whiteouts like this traditionally going back quite a ways than we have in the past year or so we're seeing whiteouts on a pretty much regular basis. They got me thinking what if these are coordinates perhaps timelines maybe this is the timeline that's being interjected or the positive path of the timeline where we have that white light that comes in that many of us about either seen in our visions or dreams or and what if this is perhaps these lines right here parallel universes multiple you know different realities so we have different lines that are going on intersecting different parameters. It's really interesting to look at and think about because everything is energy and as we've seen a lot of things are going on that are proving that we're converging timelines including all these Mandela effects that we've experienced throughout recent years. Now I just saw another one for it was a Christmas Mandela effect and it's naming the reindeer. Apparently there was no Donner Donner. There is a Donner in Blitzen but there's no Donner. I don't remember that. I don't recall ever there being a Donner with a D, D-O-N-D-E-R. So I found that really interesting. There's a few more Mandela effects for Christmas but I'm not going to cover them here. That was the one that I found very interesting because we are talking about timelines converging right now and meeting and you know ultimately we've gone into these two main timelines which may have little subdivisions off of them that'll either detract you away but will probably bring you back no matter what you do it's always going to steer you back onto these lines because that's how condensed things have gotten so far and they're only going to continue. I just posted a video on my personal Facebook page of riots that are going on in France and this ties in with Pluto and Capricorn which if you've followed in 5D throughout the years I've been talking about this for years Pluto entered Capricorn in 2008 right on schedule we saw a banking collapse of all the too big to fail slash jail banks and we saw the housing bubble burst we've seen a lot of things go on right on schedule in 2008 and as I predicted right off the bat I said you will see a collapse of money government and religion. Now the last time Pluto was in Capricorn was in the 1800s during both the French and American revolutions French and American revolutions France is revolting right now here in the United States we have what's being called the Great Awakening so it's not a coincidence nothing none of this is happening by coincidence at all and Pluto stays in Capricorn until 2023 so here we are approaching 2020 and the truth vibration is just skyrocketing the truth is coming out no matter how hard those in the cabal try to keep us down no matter how hard they try we are going to win we've already won so it's really important that you continue to focus on that which you wish to create the New Earth 5D Earth and don't pay as much attention to the news anything negative keep your positive thoughts going forward and don't allow the negativity to overcome you because ultimately that's what they're trying to get you know idolizing these movie stars and celebrities that sing musicians and stuff like that these popular ones that have already signed their souls away that's the last thing you want to do is listen to these clowns that don't have your best interests at heart so that was a lot for this human resonance look forward I look forward to this continuing seeing patterns of more and more whiteouts as as we go further into these energies now keep in mind too you know since the late probably 1980s some of you might be too young to remember this but the Sun started going from yellow to white and it's now white it's burning a whole new different energy it's burning so hot right now it's so and with all these photons that are coming in from the photon belt it's feeding into the Sun and being transferred to us as well through the Sun so you got the photons going through the Sun the photons coming directly to us creating all sorts of different energies that are going on so it's interfering with our Sun but it's also creating helping to create part of the transformation it's so many different things at once going on right now as you know consider that you know the human resonance the energy is being emitted from Earth back out the energies from the galactic center and especially as we approach the winter solstice coming up yet another three three three or twelve twelve twelve solstice more likely a three three three because that'd be more about two one but reversed so it'd be another three three three gateway coming up in about a week or so so all sorts of energies that are coming in stay in tune with them try to stick around it as much as possible don't tune into the negativity and keep pushing forward with the positive you are that beacon of light you are emitting and radiating that energy that the world needs to see and feel so if you're just tuning in my name is Greg Prescott from n5d.com and you're watching the Patreon mid-month energy report for December 2019 and what we did was we just were we were just talking about the human resonance and how it spiked here now I've got some numbers in front of me when it peaked on 1212 it also peaked at 74 Hertz which is pretty high so you can tell you know through the amount of Hertz energies that are coming in how powerful these energies are and we also talked about the possibility of you know these horizontal and vertical lines representing perhaps different timelines or timelines merging here we see a bunch of vertical lines going across the screen it's a lot of possibilities now for some reason or another I've been going back to the information provided by by Orion's Cube and Project Looking Glass where there are two divergent timelines going on timeline A and timeline B timeline B is a cataclysmic timeline where those who don't take part that are not involved with timeline A stay here on the earth and go through all these cataclysmic changes that are occurring as we speak I'll be talking about this a little later on but right now there are over 1500 active volcanoes and 24 volcanoes that are currently erupting I'll be talking more about this on the patreon version of this energy report in the extended version so we have all these energy cataclysmic cataclysm that are happening on timeline B but the majority of us will be going to timeline A and that is the spiritual evolution timeline when you look at a lot of people that are in movies and music you see this satanistic agenda going on for example on Twitter people like bet middler musician Rob Reiner producer and actor I guess he was a meathead on all in the family they're pushing this this whacked out version of reality that not many people can align to and what is happening is they're they're involved with the the deep state the dark cabal satanistic agendas they're tied into many of these people and I'm not saying definitively bet middler or Rob Reiner but many of these people in these circles are tied into pedophilia as well it's a horrendous horrendous cycle of evil and negativity if you look at like any of the recent Super Bowl halftime shows you'll see a lot of this satanic profiling going on as well as in many of the current music videos a lot of people for example Katy Perry who was raised by Christian parents I believe both of her parents were pastors she's already admitted you know that she basically sold her soul and she doesn't care about the consequences she's already chosen that path to be if you're watching this you have nothing to worry about okay we're all going to path a but that but it gives you an idea why we're seeing so much diversity going on a lot of negativity going on especially by the mainstream media who's trying to control our thoughts you know television is tell a lie vision and it's all mind control basically you know it's reinforcing these thoughts within those who follow and basically these people are the false idols that we've been warned about so you know we have these two timelines we have the merging of timelines into basically two paths we've already chosen ours they've chosen theirs so don't put too much energy into what they're doing choose our path our energies focus on that new earth that we're creating 5d earth that we're bringing to us focus on the love and delight okay what we see with these energies is we have all these energies coming in but we're not thinking about the energies that we're putting out because every one of us is a beacon of light every one of us has that ability to change the world around us just by thinking positive thoughts you could be walking in a mall seeing how the malls are empty mainly filled with closed stores that you know thanks to amazon but you as an example you could be walking in a mall and you're just thinking loving thoughts you might look at someone and think i love you and that's all you have to do that thought has to go somewhere right it you end up putting that energy out from within you you become that beacon of light and love i love you i love you just say that to your in your mind smile not at people you can say hi but in your mind you're saying i love you i do this on the beach good morning i love you that kind of thing so put that out there it'll change the world the last thing i want to talk about here on youtube is are the energies that we are feeling as i mentioned earlier not everyone is feeling the same thing what many people are feeling may be subtle energies for example you might have an eye ache or a stye in your eye or snipples or sneeze a lot headaches but it could be intense energies that you're feeling and instead of an eye ache or a headache you're having migraines or flu like symptoms you know it can run this gamut of energy and ascension related symptoms that are going along with these energy intakes ultimately what we're seeing and understanding is that many of these are due to dna upgrades especially feeling tired on december 12 i was hit hard i had to go to sleep twice one one time late in the morning and then probably about four five hours later i you know three or four o'clock or so i took another nap i was just hit really hard and that's when we're getting these dna upgrades is when we when we sleep so if you're being called to sleep obviously if you're at work you can't do that but you know if it's your weekend don't feel badly that oh i'm wasting my weekend by sleeping no you're actually helping yourself through these upgrades to help your dna evolve further and you're helping yourself spiritually grow as well so make sure that you do get your sleep in the last thing i want to mention is that i did stop doing the daily high-pitch frequency reports i still pay attention to them and for those who are interested today's high-pitch frequency is the f-sharp which is the crown chakra and the heart chakra so if you're feeling any kind of you know maybe palpitations or like soothing unconditional love for no reason whatsoever or feeling feeling a tingling sensation on your on your crown chakra or in your crown chakra area that's why so i'm going to continue the rest of this on patreon i want to encourage you to stay here though on youtube as i'll play the bumper music for an additional five or six minutes and we'll hang out in chat if you have anything you want to ask me you can ask me there if you have any comments you'd like to leave you can leave them right below this video i'm curious how you guys felt during the 12 12 12 the 3 3 3 gateway and what you expect perhaps upcoming would be winter solstice and our final 3 3 3 gateway of 2019 so until the next time i'm sending you all infinite love and light and for those watching on patreon let's keep going so


It's already been said, I'm Benny Brecht from Paderborn University in Germany. I'm not a professor, I have to say, I'm a doctor. I'm working in Christine's Alba Horn's group, so she's the PI. And we're speaking today about modern technologies for quantum photonics. We have two very different lectures. The first one is very heavy, really, on technology, on device fabrication. How do we build devices that we can use for quantum photonics? The second lecture is more about underlying concepts, like how are we thinking, how are we using our degrees of freedom? And well, you've already seen the second slide. For those of you who don't know where Paderborn is, most Germans actually don't. So it's not a problem not to know. Paderborn is a small town in North Rhine-Westphalia, roughly in the center of Germany. It's a very historic town with an old cathedral. We have this historic town hall. As you can see from the pictures, we always have good weather, which is one of the perks of being in Paderborn. I'm going to show you what's about our group. The integrated quantum optics group in Paderborn largely separates into three subgroups. The first subgroup is the technology subgroup. This is our clean room. This is where we fabricate our devices and the group is led by Christopher Eigner. We're mainly working with lithium niobate and potassium titanol phosphate, so KTP. Since recently, we're also working with lithium niobate and insulator, which is a very promising new material, which I will say a few words on towards the end of the lecture. Here we're really doing everything in-house. We're buying lithium niobate wafers. We're dicing them into chips. We're indiffusing waveguides. We're doing periodic polling. We apply dielectric and facet coatings. We sputter on electrodes. We do bonding for electro-optic modulators, so everything is done in-house. The second subgroup is the devices subgroup, which is led by Harald Herrmann. And here we try to take all the capabilities from the clean room and turn them into multifunctional devices. We're looking at optical circuits. We're looking at modeling of our devices, characterizing them. Some key devices are electro-optic modulators, which I will come through later in the lecture. We're also doing very rudimentary amount of packaging and fiberpick tailing to really get our devices to a point where they are hands-off in operation, and we can just have them sitting on the table and doing the thing. The last subgroup is Quantum Networks Group, which I'm leading. Here we're looking into ultra-fast quantum optics and quantum walks. The idea here is really to look at fundamental quantum optics, quantum applications in the fields of quantum metrology, quantum communications, quantum simulations. We're very much working with techniques of time multiplexing. We're looking into topological effects, and that will be part of the next lecture. We're looking into temporal pulse modes and quantum pulse skating. Now, the outline of this lecture is following, I'll first speak a bit about underlying concepts. Why do we want to do integrated quantum photonics in the first place? Why don't we just do it in bulk optics? I'll then introduce the device toolbox you need to have at your disposal if you want to build integrated quantum optical circuits. There's a number of devices that you need to have to be able to implement all functionalities that you may want. I'll then speak about our fabrication technology. How do we fabricate our devices? And I'll finish with an example of our home on a chip circuit, which you can already see in the background of the slide. So why do we want to do integrated quantum photonics? These are two pictures. The left one is from Akira Furusawa's group in Tokyo. It's a picture of the continuous variable quantum teleportation experiment they set up. The right one is from a recent paper from Jan Waipan's group, which was on 20 photon boson sampling in a 60-mote interferometer. These experiments show incredibly nice results. And they're really beautiful. But it's my very personal belief, and it's not a general opinion, but it's my very personal belief that this way of building an experiment is not scalable. Which you can see here, a rate around the center block are 60 single-mode fiber couplings. And you can set them up. You can build 60 fiber couplings. If you're very dedicated, you can probably set up 100 fiber couplings, no problem. Now, if you're thinking, for instance, of a quantum computer, which you want to build with optics, you might need 1,000 or 5,000 or maybe 10,000 fiber couplings. And this is something you won't be doing in that architecture anymore. I don't think there is a way that you can actually do that. So one solution to that could be integrated quantum optics. And here is a paper from the late 60s from Stuart Miller. He was essentially the inventor of integrated optics back then. Because during the 60s, classical optics was facing a very similar problem. How do we build setups that we can actually scale in size and that we can make robust against environmental influence? Let me just read the abstract. This paper outlines a proposal for miniature form of laser beam circuitry. Index of refraction changes of the order of 10 to the minus 2 or 10 to the minus 3 in a substrate such as glass allow guided laser beams of widths near 10 microns. Photolithographic techniques may permit simultaneous construction of complex circuit patterns. This paper also indicates possible miniature forms for laser modulator and hybrids. If realized, this new art would facilitate isolating the laser circuit assembly from thermal, mechanical, and acoustic ambient changes through small overall size. Economy should ultimately result. And to date, this paper, in a sense, is very timely again. Because it almost reads like a roadmap for going from conventional classical integrated optics to integrated quantum optics. By just changing a few words, you can make that a paper that you could publish today without any problem. So you just check in quantum every year in there. Whenever it's about beam circuitries, you call them quantum circuitries. And at one point, you exchange laser for photon source. Then this abstract reads, this paper outlines a proposal for miniature form of quantum circuitry. Index of reflection changes of the order of 10 to the minus 2, 10 to the minus 3 in a substrate such as glass allow guided laser beams of width near 10 microns. Photolithographic techniques may permit simultaneous construction of complex circuit patterns. This paper also indicates possible miniature forms for photon source, modulator, and hybrids. If realized, this new art would facilitate isolating the quantum circuit assembly from thermal, mechanical, and acoustic ambient changes through a small overall size. Economy should ultimately result. That very much reads like the quantum technology roadmap of the European Union, in a sense. Now, the idea, at least our idea, our approach to integrated quantum optics is not to reinvent the wheel, but to keep established ideas, but adapt them to quantum optics. Integrated optics is doing a great job. All the devices are working, so we don't have to think about reinventing all of them. We just have to see which of those we have to exchange in order to build quantum integrated optics instead of classical integrated optics. If you think about a quantum optical experiment that you would want to integrate, you will find that most of them have a very common structure. You have to create photons at some point.  One objective of integrated quantum optics would be to actually integrate as many of those components as possible, maybe on one platform, if you can. If not, you have to use a hybridized platform made of different materials. But ideally, you want to stick to one platform as long as you can. So you want to make that overlap region in the center as big as possible for your choice of materials. And this is also not a terribly new idea. This is a picture from a paper from 2012 by Alanis Borogussi and Philip Walter, where they looked at a photonic quantum simulator. You will find that this also consists of a source part where you generate photons, a circuit part where you manipulate them, and a detection part. The circuit part is always assumed to be linear, as in linear optical quantum computation. The source part necessarily needs to have some sort of non-linearity to generate your photons. The benefit about that is that if you can build this in an integrated way, you can control many different spatial modes, because you don't have to align them. They are inscribed in your material. You have inherent interferometric stability, so you don't need face-locking techniques. You can build comparably compact devices. You have, I would say, a simple operation. Well, once you know how to actually operate your waveguides, it becomes simple. It's a bit of an uphill struggle to get to that point. But definitely once that thing is sitting on your table, you don't have to realign it anymore. It's just sitting there and doing a thing. And you can have high efficiency in these architectures. There's a small question mark because we always have to battle losses whenever we're propagating through our material. There will be some sort of loss, which we don't have in free space propagation. But we can engineer that. We can try to minimize that. And then we can build highly efficient devices. And the linear circuit part has been looked at. And I'm just flashing a few examples. It's not an exhaustive list. There's a lot of work from groups in Bristol who are looking on a silicon and insulator platform for integrated quantum photonics. There has been work in Rome from Paul of Mataloni's group, which they were looking at quantum walks in an integrated structure that was a laser written structure from Robato O'Salam's group. There has been work in Oxford and by other groups looking at boson sampling and integrated structures, again in laser written waveguides. However, the non-linear source part, something that's not as easy to do. I'll come to the big why in a few slides, but it has to do with the cartooning linearity which you need for some elements that you might want to use. Because of that, we chose to work with lithium niobate. Lithium niobate allows for the fabrication of low-loss waveguides. You can build integrated devices on lithium niobate. It has a K2 non-linearity, which you can use for photon pair generation and electro-optic modulation. So with the electro-optic modulation, you can build fast switches. So conceivably, you can do feed-forward and feedback operations in your circuit. You can build all sorts of devices on lithium niobate. You can build photon pair generators. You can do polarization converters, phase shifters, frequency converters. You can also include superconducting detectors directly on your substrate. Then you have to operate your substrate at cryogenic temperatures, but you don't have to couple to fibers anymore to go to your detectors. So we think that we can implement complex quantum circuits in lithium niobate, where for us, the most complex thing we've done so far is the Hormone chip sample that I will show you later. Now, what device toolbox do you need if you want to build integrated quantum photonic networks? First of all, you need some sort of passive routing. You may need power splitters. You may need polarization splitters, wavelength multiplexers and demultiplexers, just things to guide your light through your circuit as you would do in bulk optics. Then you need the generation and storage part. You need to be able to generate photons, probably change the frequencies and bandwidths and conversion processes. And ultimately, if you want to build large circuits, you want to have quantum memories as well for scalability. You need some active manipulation. If you want to reconfigurable circuit, you want to be able to do that fast. So what you need for that are, for instance, phase shifters to control the phases of interferometers, polarization converters that may act as half and quarter wave plates, and spatial switches that act as tunable beam splitters, which you can basically tune from zero to 100% reflectivity by applying a voltage. Finally, you may need interfacing. You won't be able to do everything on a single substrate, either because your substrate doesn't provide the functionality or because it's not big enough, or because you have external detectors, or because you want to send photons to a remote location. So at some point, you will have to couple your photons to fibers. To do that, you need efficient fiber wave cut coupling and ideally dielectric coatings to reduce reflections at interfaces between different devices. Every of those components has already been built for classical photonics. So we're not reinventing the wheel. They also have been optimized for classical photonics. What does that mean?  Check in an amplifier somewhere in your transmission line and your golden. That doesn't work with quantum optics, unfortunately, because if you lose a photon, it's gone. You can't amplify it. So that means that you do have to re-optimize these devices for quantum applications in the sense that you really have to work on reducing the losses. 3 dB insertion loss for a spatial switch is not an option for a quantum integrated network. You can't afford to lose 50% of your photons at every beam splitter. But other than that, the devices exist and people know how they work. Now, let's go through them and see how they work and what you can do with them. And we'll start with the passive routing which you do via so-called directional couplers. Directional couplers are devices with two waveguides. You bring them closely together such that the light can couple from one waveguide to the other. They are together in a central section with a certain coupling length and then you separate them again. And depending on how you design that device, you can build just simple power splitters. You can build wavelength division multiplexers. You can build polarization splitters. You can build any sort of interference device. So it can act as any sort of beam splitter that you would use otherwise in bulk optics. How does it work? Well, as long as the two waveguides are separated and there is no coupling between the waveguide, so your coupling constant is zero, you can describe the light in the waveguide mode description. So you're looking at either modes in waveguide one or modes in waveguide two. If your waveguides are identical, they will just have the same propagation constant. So they're just traveling along your waveguide, not talking to each other. You bring your waveguides closely together such that you have a coupling. You can't use the waveguide mode description anymore. You have to use an eigen mode description where you have a symmetric eigen mode that basically extends over both waveguides. You have an asymmetric eigen mode. Propagation constant of those will be modified by your coupling constant leading to an interference between these two modes. You get a beating and superposition of these two modes. If you just add them up, you will end up with light in waveguide two and no light in waveguide one. If you subtract them, you will end up with light in waveguide one and no light in waveguide two. So as these modes propagate along your coupling region, you will have beating between them and you will couple back and forth from one waveguide to the other. You then, at the right point, separate the waveguides again. You have managed a couple light from one to the other. Here's an example of a wavelength division multiplexer where the aim is to separate light at 1,320 nanometers from light at around 890 nanometers. Now, here you make use of the fact that different wavelengths have a different mode area. 890 nanometer light will be confined more strongly than 1,300 nanometer light. So while 1,300 nanometer light can couple between the waveguides, there is no coupling for the 890 nanometer light. This means that if you look at the output power in the cross-state, meaning you're sending light in here, you're looking at the output down there, you see that there is no coupling for the 890 nanometer, regardless of the coupling length, but the 1,320 light follows the sinusoidal pattern and somewhere around nine millimeter coupling length, you have complete coupling of the 1,320 to the lower channel, whereas the 890 is still in the upper channel. And this is where you want to operate your device. Looking at a polarization splitter, they are slightly different in geometry. They are so-called zero-gap couplers where the two waveguides will actually touch each other in the center region. And these are couplers that you operate in a so-called low coupling order. This means that the light will not bounce back and forth between the waveguides many times upon propagation through coupling length, but only once or twice. This means on the one hand that you do have to hit your coupling length very precisely. Ideally, you want to be exactly at the trough here as soon as you move out of that little bit, you basically lose in splitting ratio. On the other hand, you get a very robust device as in it's comparably broadband in wavelength regime. And one thing you can see here is that for a coupling length of, in that case, half a millimeter, that's a very short coupler, you get roughly 20 dB of splitting, which is sufficient for most applications that you want to do. And we typically have excess losses in these devices of below half a dB. Now, let's turn to the active modulators where we use electro-optic modulation. And for that, I quickly have to introduce, first of all, tell you that you do need a K2 non-linearity for that. You can't build electro-optic modulators, for instance, in glass, so you do need the K2. Second, I have to say a few words about non-linear polarization of a medium. The dielectric polarization of a medium is induced via an electric field that's coupled to the non-linear tensor of your medium, or dielectric tensor of your medium. And as long as the response to your electric field is purely linear, as in that case here, you're speaking of a linear medium. This would be just your refractive index. As soon as this response becomes non-linear, which could happen, for instance, by increasing the driving strength of the field, you might see non-linear terms, or just by having a second order non-linear response from your medium directly, you're speaking of a non-linear polarization. You then typically do is you do a tailor expansion of your polarization in terms of orders of non-linearity. So you have the linear term, which is your refractive index. You have your second order non-linearity for which you need a non-centrosymmetric crystal, and which is used, for instance, for electro-optic modulation. The third order non-linearity, which would be the cause for four-wave mixing, or self-phase modulation, cross-phase modulation of pulses. And electro-optic modulation is the interaction between optical and electric fields. So one of these fields would be an optical field, the other one an electrical field. Works in the following way. On the upper right, you see a picture of a sample. You have a wave guide with an electrode on top, and another electrode sitting next to it. And you apply a voltage between the two electrodes. This will lead to an electric field through your wave guide. If your wave guide is very small, that field will primarily point downwards into your sample. If you choose your crystal orientation appropriately, you can make use of what's shown here, the R33 component. That is the component of the electro-optic tensor, which in Lithium Niobate is strongest. There are different components, R33 is strongest, so you have the strongest interaction between the electric field and the light field. What this electric field now does for you is it induces a change of the refractive index in your wave guide. Because your wave guide has a finite area, you have to average over the wave guide cross-section to do via this integral term. Then you get an effective index change that is dependent on the applied voltage. Because wave guides are very small, you only need very low voltages, so you can achieve very high driving speeds. You can achieve modulations in the order of up to 125 gigahertz in wave guide modulators, which is something you couldn't do in bulk cells, they're just too large. The most common sort of modulator is a Maxinda modulator. So it's a Maxinda interferometer, which you use for intensity modulation. And in that case, what you want to have is a very sophisticated arrangement of electrodes. There's three electrodes in total, two on top of two wave guides, one to the side, they have to be impedance matched, they have to be velocity matched, so it's really a feat of engineering building these things. But if you have one, you can operate them for instance at 40 gigahertz, which would be the standard telecom speed. Good thing about Maxinda modulators is you can just buy them. They are standard telecoms components. If you're working in telecom wavelength, you can go to any telecoms company and they will sell your Maxinda modulators. They typically look like that, they are fiber pigtails, they have input and output fibers. You typically have one plug for your radio signal, which you use to basically quickly modulate the light. You have a few more pins to apply some bias voltage to choose the operation point. For instance. However, again, with these modulators, you're facing a problem of insertion loss. Typically, they would have something like 1 dB if you're careful with your fiber splices, meaning that you have 10% loss at a modulator. So you have 90% transmission, that doesn't sound too bad. Assume you want to build 100 by 100 network of modulators. 0.9 to the power of 100 times 100 is an incredibly small number. So you wouldn't want to use these modulators for large quantum applications. Look in a polarization converters. We have to add one more thing which we hadn't before and that's that gray structure inside the waveguide here. This is a periodic polling and you need that to achieve face matching between the two polarization modes. The reason for that is that lithium niobate is a birefringent material, meaning the two polarizations experience different refractive indices. So they will have different wave vectors inside your waveguide. You want to convert from one polarization to the other. You have somehow to find a mechanism that allows you to match the two wave vectors. And you do that by introducing an additional momentum component via this periodic polling, by which you just flip the sign of the non-linearity of the crystal periodically. And the polling period, which is called capital lambda here, will define this additional component in your face matching. You can achieve what's called quasi face matching. You can build polarization converters. I won't be going into much more detail than that on that. Now, here are curves from a device we built in Paderborn. This is the response as a function of wavelength. And you can see we have an optimal conversion for something like 1587 nanometers in that specific device. Or with a bandwidth of about two nanometers, which one integrated device isn't too bad. Two nanometers actually means that you can use it for pulsed light. You don't have to be CW. You don't have to hit that wavelength on spot. You can work with a reasonable bandwidth. At the same time, we use the conversion efficiency between TE and TM polarization as a function of the applied voltage. We can see we can basically switch from one polarization to the other. That would be a halfway plate rotation with a voltage of about 10 volts. So that's something that's still doable. And you can still switch it reasonably fast. Now, moving on to the next part, generation and storage. I will be very brief on that one because the next lecture focuses very much in parametric down conversion. So I don't want to double all of what I'm saying. First of all, again, we're looking at non-linear optics in that case. Only now we're looking at the interaction of optical and optical fields. So where before we applied an electric field, now we have two optical fields coupling to the second order non-linearity of our material. The processes you will most often encounter in quantum photonics are second harmonic generation or frequency doubling, by which you double the frequency mainly of laser light. You would, for instance, do that if you were working in continuous variables. You needed your laser to actually also serve as a local oscillator for measuring quantum states. The next one is parametric down conversion, photon pair generation, where a strong pump induces the generation of signal and idler fields at lower frequencies. On the bottom two, sum and difference frequency generation, essentially a processes to use a strong pump field to translate the photon, the frequency of a weak field to either the sum of the frequencies or the difference of the frequencies. You could use that, for instance, if you're thinking about, you have quantum dot emitting photons at around 900 nanometers. You want to convert them to 1550 for telecommunications applications, sending them through fibers. You would use these kind of interfaces. You're quick words on parametric down conversion. In our case, guided wave parametric down conversion, we have a strong pump laser just propagating through our wave guide, which again has this periodic polling structure. Every once in a while, it might happen that a photon from the pump laser decays spontaneously into a pair of photons, then labeled signal and idler. Process has to obey energy conservation, meaning the frequency of signal and idler have to add up to the pump frequency. Process has to obey momentum conservation or face matching, meaning that the propagation constants of signal and idler plus this additional contribution from the periodic polling have to add up to the pump wavelength. This helps you to choose which signal and idler wavelength of frequency matched so it helps you to tune the wavelength of your generated photons. We're propagating through a wave guide, so we naturally have a strong field confinement, strong as opposed to focusing with a lens into a bulk crystal. And we can basically propagate with a focused spot of a long propagation distances. This leads to a high efficiency. Typically, guide wave parametric down conversion is three to four orders of magnitude more efficient than bulk parametric down conversion. It's not necessarily a cleaner system. You do not necessarily get better quantum states, but you get many more of them, which in some cases can be very helpful. With lithium niobate, you can go up to propagation length of about 90 millimeters. This is limited by the available size of lithium niobate wafers, which is four inches. So you can buy them in discs of about that size and it's really hard to get larger material in a good enough quality for quantum applications. First guided wave parametric down conversion was demonstrated in Paderborn in the group of Wolfgang Sohler back in 1986. This was in lithium niobate and they use birefringent phase matching, so no periodic polling, but using the birefringent of the crystal. And that's the spectrum, the mashat where you can see the peak, the parametric down conversion peak at around 680 nanometers. The first quasi phase matched parametric down conversion in a periodically pulled wave guide was then demonstrated 93 in Nice. And the University of Nice is still a very strong center for integrated photonics, lithium niobate, wave guides and everything you can do with them. Frequency conversion, I already briefly touched upon that. Assume you have a solid state system, a matter qubit. This could be an iron, a trapped atom. This can be a quantum dot. This can be a color center and diamond. Pick your favorite. All of them typically will have wavelengths somewhere around the UV to visible region where attenuation and optical fibers is prohibitively large. So you wouldn't want to send a UV photon through a fiber, it just doesn't make any sense. You would want to send your photon somewhere in the telecoms region. So either in the O-band around 1300 or the C-band around 1500 where the fiber losses are lowest. Mainly you would target the C-band because that's the telecommunications band where classical telecommunications operates. However, for quantum communications the O-band might also be interesting because you don't have to worry about all the bright classical signals going back and forth through your network. Basically it's 1300 nanometer band is empty so you don't have noise. Anyway, to go from that to that you need some sort of frequency conversion device. And this is just to give you a very brief overview of what people have been looking at in terms of quantum frequency conversion. It's essentially converting single photon level light from one wavelength to the other. Most of the works have focused on photons somewhere in the visible range. These can be from quantum dots, these can be from nitrogen vacancy centers in diamond, these types of systems. There was one demonstration in Southampton and Oxford where people tried converting light from 422 nanometers to 1550. Basically the idea was that that would be an interface to link strontium ions to the telecommunications band and strontium ions are interesting candidates for ion trap quantum computing. And in our group we are running two of these interfaces. We have one that is highly engineered. I will touch upon that in the next lecture which is converting green to the telecom. And we've built another one which is actually going down to 369 nanometers that's a calcium transition which we're also linked in that case to the telecom O band. I have to say that 369 conversion was done in KTP not in lithium niobate. Lithium niobate starts to absorb as hell somewhere below 400. So you can't use lithium niobate at 370 nanometers. Good, but that become to the last part of the toolbox and that's interfacing. And I'll start with the dielectric and facet coatings. Now just give you an example. The interesting curve here is the red curve. The green curve is the transmission characteristics of a coating which we measure on a sample substrate made of glass. Glass has a different reflective index than lithium niobate which you have to correct for. So the red curve is the response of the coating on lithium niobate. The setting we're looking at is parametric down conversion. You use strong light at 800 nanometers. You coupled it to a wave guide. You generate photons at around 1600 nanometers. And at the end of the day you want the photons at the output but not your strong pump light. At the same time you want the strong pump light to enter your wave guide efficiently. Lithium niobate has a high refractive index meaning you have an interface loss of about 16% for 800 nanometers. You don't want to lose 16% of your pump light just because you didn't apply a dielectric coating. So what you can do is you apply coatings just as you would for instance for mirrors on the end facets and in that case the input facet has a coating that has a transmission of around 96% at 800 nanometers. We don't care about the longer wavelength for that coating. However at the output we want to get rid of our pump light but still transmit the photons efficiently. So you need a multi-band coating which has a low transmission for the pump light in that case transmission for the pump light is below 1% but a high transmission for the generated photons which again is in the order of 95%. Being able to use these coatings actually helps you because you can get rid of a lot of additional filtering in your setups. Every component you can get rid of essentially means you have lower losses again meaning you can add more components to your system meaning you can build bigger networks and that's what it's all about at the end of the day. Then wave guide to fiber coupling. That's a bit of a tricky thing because if you look at the spatial mode of a single mode fiber that's a nice round blob. Now lithium niobate waveguides at least the titanium-indiffused waveguides we are using are waveguides that are sitting exactly at the surface of the sample. So at the top of your waveguide you have a refractive index jump from lithium niobate about 2.2 to air which is 1.0. That means that the modes coming out of a lithium niobate waveguide are slightly squeezed along this upper line here. That's basically the edge of the sample. However, if you do it correctly you still get overlaps of about 93% without working too hard. So you optimize your fabrication parameters. You do your fiber coupling. You have less than 1 dB of losses to fiber interface. You can increase these efficiencies by further modifying your sample. For instance, you can add a cover layer on top of your waveguide which has a refractive index that's lower than lithium niobate but bigger than air. That would lead to slight symmetrization of your mode and that would increase these coupling efficiencies. Again, we're looking at a problem here where we're saying, well, we already have 93%. Why do we actually care? Well, we do care because if you can't go above 99% we don't have to bother with trying to build big circuits where we have for instance 100 photons. Because 0.93 to the power of 100 is again a very small number. That's just a picture of the pigtailing setup. This is a sample. This is a fiber ferrule. This blue light are UV LEDs which we use to cure the glue with which we glue the ferrule to the sample. So you basically try to optimize the coupling by monitoring the power.  All right, waveguide fabrication, basically our fabrication technology. First of all, we fabricate waveguides. We do that by depositing a thin layer of titanium onto a lithium-nibre substrates and then coating that with a photoresist. We then do mask photolithography to pattern the photoresist such that only strips are remaining. The next step is chemical etching of the titanium and removal of the photoresist which means that the titanium only survives underneath the photoresist so you have titanium strips running along your sample. Now you do indiffusion of the titanium. The titanium indiffuses into the lithium-nibre. It increases the refractive index and you have a guiding structure. Indiffusion happens at around 1060 degrees for roughly eight hours for telecoms waveguides and around 30 hours for MIR waveguides. We can do both with roughly these parameters. Your waveguides will be single mode so guide only one spatial mode. We typically do the diffusion in a platinum box. This is to avoid out diffusion of titanium and also to avoid indiffusion of other particles. The purer the titanium, the lower the waveguide losses. After fabrication, we do a mode characterization where we couple light from an EDF-A that's just amplified spontaneous emission. You want incoherent light for that. Into a waveguide sample, we monitor it with a CCD camera and this is again a comparison between a fiber mode and a typical waveguide mode at telecoms wavelength. After that, we do a loss measurement. Our samples have an infested reflectivity of about 14% at telecoms. You can think of them as a Fabry-Perot resonator. You couple CW light to your resonator. Now you slowly change the resonator length. You do that by heating your sample. This will lead to intensity fringes at the output of your sample. If you know the reflectivity of your mirrors very well, the contrast of the fringes will tell you something about the losses inside your resonator. So you learn about the propagation losses in your waveguide in an undistructive way. You don't have to do cutback measurements. We take a long sample, measure the coupling, cut it into short pieces, measure the coupling again. That's a typical trace that you see. From that, you can then basically calculate the losses and we're generally below 0.1 dB per centimeter. We can do better if we work really hard. Periodic polling. Few words about physics behind that. This crystalline structure of lithium niobate, the red bloods are the oxygen layers and the green and gray blobs are the niobium and lithium ions. And you can see that there is always one empty layer and then a mixture of lithium and niobium. That gives you spontaneous polarization. They too form an electric dipole. Now, periodic polling means that you apply an external electric field above the coercive field strength of lithium niobate. That's 21 kilovolts per millimeter. Our samples are half a millimeter thick, so we have to apply fields of around 11 kilovolts. What that will do is shown in the following animation. I hope, yeah. If you apply the electric field, the niobium ions will stay in the layer, but the lithium ions will be squeezed to the adjacent layer of oxygen. So you flip the direction of the spontaneous polarization of your material. This flips the direction of your non-linearity. This in turn gives you the periodic polling. If you turn off the electric field, that polling is permanent, so you don't have to worry about domains flipping back. Again, we do periodic polling on the waveguides by starting with a layer of photoresist. We do photolithographic patterning. Now we carve out small holes from our waveguide. We apply the high voltage with liquid electrodes. Upon application of high voltage pulses, these domains start to grow, and if you stop at the right point, you get an exact 50-50 duty cycle of your periodic polling. This is an example of a periodically-pulled waveguide. That one has a polling period of four and a half micrometers. When we started in Paderborn roughly 10 years ago, state of the art was something like seven micrometers, and people were telling us you can't pull waveguides with smaller periods. Today, we can do sub-2 micron polling periods. That doesn't work on every sample, but we can do it. Four and a half microns we have under control. We can do that reliably. That specific waveguide has propagation loss of 0.02 dB per centimeter, so you're not losing a lot of light. We're coupling to single-mode fibers of more than 85%, and we're characterizing our samples in every way possible. We're doing linear characterization of losses of spatial modes. We're doing nonlinear characterizations for face matching, so we're looking at second harmonic generation, some frequency generation, parametric down conversion. We do that for every waveguide on every sample, just to give feedback to our technology. So if you were to collaborate with us and you would get a sample from us, you would know exactly what you were getting for every waveguide on that sample. Drowned by a waveguide sample from commercial vendors and asked them for characterization, it's a bit of an uphill struggle to get any information. Now, dielectric coatings, we use iron-assisted deposition, whereby target material is deposited onto the samples. The iron-assisted deposition technique helps to form high-density coatings, which means they don't degrade over time due to instance for instance due to water absorption, so the coatings just stay there as they are. This is a picture of our coating machine and our coating technicians. We have two full-time clean room technicians. One is the expert on periodic polling, the other one is the expert on dielectric coatings. I've been told by our clean room guys, it's more than just knowing the technique, you have to have the feeling for it, which I obviously don't have, so I'm staying with my quantum networks. Anyway, you can build mirrors from dielectric coatings. This is just an example of the reflectivity of a quarter-wave stack, so each layer is a quarter-wave length of the target that you want to achieve. You can use different materials, we typically use titanium dioxide and silicon dioxide. So another example again of a three-band coating now, we are low-transmissive at 532 nanometers with high-transmission bands at 81550. That was again a parametric down-conversion source where we pumped with green light and generated photons at 81550.  Right, with that, in the last few minutes, let me show you, for this lecture, let me show you the Hormone chip source. And first of all, some quantum devices that we've built. We've built a fully integrated plug-and-play single-photon source. It's fully fiber-coupled, you just plug in your laser on one end, you get out your photons at two fibers at the other end. And that source has been running for three years without any degradation of performance. We've built an integrated noon source where you pump with a laser pulse, you have a periodically pulled directional coupler at the output, you have a noon state which is already separated into waveguide channels. We've built a photon triplet source where instead of generating photon pairs, you're generating photon triplets. We've also built a polarization entanglement source which generates polarization entangled belt states which, again, are already separated into two waveguides. So you can do fiber-butt coupling, you don't have to do any additional external manipulation. The sample I want to talk about is our Hormone chip sample. I think most of you are familiar with Hormone interference, just a brief recap. Two photons interfere at a balanced 50-50 beam splitter. There are four possibilities in principle. Both photons can leave the beam splitter at the left port or the right port, or both photons can be transmitted or reflected. If you do your quantum calculus and if the photons are indistinguishable, the center two possibilities cancel out and you're left with photon bunching. You measure that by looking at coincidence counts between the outputs of your beam splitter as a function of indistinguishability, for instance, a time delay. If you scan your time delay and you measure coincidences, you will get this homomandal dip, which ideally dips to below 50% visibility that tells you you're non-classical. Right, what do you do if you want to build a homomandal experiment? In bulk optics, you would start with a parametric down conversion source. That's a type two source, photons of orthogonal polarizations. You separate them on a polarizing beam splitter. You introduce a time delay. You swap the polarization of one photon. You interfere them on a 50-50 beam splitter. You look for coincidences. We thought, let's do that on chip. There we go. Polarizing beam splitter is easy. That's a directional coupler. I've shown you that we can build them. Half-wave plates are easy. These are electro-optic modulators. We can build them. Beam splitters are easy. These are just directional couplers. We can build them again. The question was, how the hell do you build a tunable time delay on an integrated chip? You can't just stretch and compress a wave guide. It doesn't respond very well to do in that. It will typically break. So how do you do that? And it turns out that for once in a lifetime in integrated optics, birefringent is not your foe.  But in that case, it's actually your friend. So what's happening? Birefringent means that two photons travel at different velocities. We generate our two photons. They propagate through the wave guide. We flip the polarization of one. We send them to the beam splitter. They arrive at the beam splitter at different times. This would mean we're measuring a point somewhere out there at our home dip where nothing interesting happens. However, what you can do is you can add an additional polarization converter directly after your sample. What that one does for you, PDC generates your photons. They walk off from each other. You flip the polarizations. Formally fast photon becomes the slow photon and vice versa. Now the slow photon has time to catch up during propagation in your sample. If at the right time you switch the polarization of the now slow photon, they will propagate together and meet at the beam splitter. That's exactly what's happening here. You flip the polarization of the photons. They meet up. You flip again, you send them to the beam splitter. Now, we've built a segmented polarization converter, meaning we can choose where to flip the polarization of the second photon, giving it more or less time to catch up with the first photon. That allows us to sample discrete time delays along the home dip. If we turn off the first polarization converter, we can sample the wings of our home dip. This is what you get from the experiment. The blue curve and the gray shaded curve are theory, gray shaded, including experimental imperfections. The dots are the measurement points. We see a dip visibility of 93%, which isn't too bad. It's also not too brilliant. But the important point is that we've managed to implement a tunable time delay of about 13 picoseconds on an integrated chip. So we can now delay our photons on demand by about 13 picoseconds, which is something that you might need in a large network for synchronization purpose or anything else. So we've built all of that. Where do we go from here? What are the next steps?  Well, big next step is following. We've built that thing. That waveguide chip is already 90 millimeters long. There is no way we can fit more components onto one single chip. The reason for that is that we're working with weekly guiding waveguides, so we have to build comparatively large structures. Contrast to that, there's that whole field of silicon and insulator photonics. This is a picture, as an example, from Doug Englund's group at MIT. That chip comprises 88 max-inter interferometers with two thermo-optic phase shifters each, and a sample that's about five millimeters long. Why can they do that? They can do it because silicon waveguides have this incredible high refractive index change to air. You have very small structures. You can do very small banding radii. You have this high integration depth, and that's been optimized by industry. Computer chips are built on silicon technology. Combine these two. Take the high integration depth and the functionality of lithium niobate. You end up with lithium niobate on insulator. You have a thin film of lithium niobate sitting on an insulator. The technique to build this was, again, developed in Pada Born by an involved gang solace group. The guide responsible for that was Huihu. He's now back in China. He's running a company. He's selling that stuff. By now, this material is good enough for quantum applications. The losses are low enough for quantum applications. People are looking at that. People are looking at cascaded processes. People are looking at high-efficiency couplers to reduce losses. People are looking at low-less circuits. People are looking at niobate electro-optic modulators where they show modulation of up to 125 gigahertz. And I think that this is something where lithium niobate has to go towards to realize large quantum photonic networks on chip. Samaria talked in that lecture about the underlying concepts of why we want to do integrated quantum photonics in Pada Born. Why we think that bulk optics ultimately will not scale up to really large networks? Not saying that you shouldn't use bulk optics because for many applications, it's the easiest thing to do. But I don't think it will scale up to something like 10,000 nodes. I don't see it. I've shown you the device toolbox that you need to have at your disposal if you want to do integrated photonics. I've shown you our fabrication technology with which we can fabricate every single device from the device toolbox and finally shown you that we can combine them onto multifunctional chips and we can build quantum photonic circuits with our technology. But that I want to thank you for the first lecture. It's a picture of our group. I'm also thanking our funding agencies. Just to let you know, we do have open positions as for PhD students as well for postdocs. And we typically have open positions even if we don't advertise them. So if you should ever be in a position of looking for a new position and you think this could be interesting, just get in touch with us and we can see what we can do. That's it for that lecture. I'm happy to answer questions if there are any. Thank you.


from sunny Honolulu. This is Howard Wigg, cold grain think-tank Hawaii. Guess what the first state was to declare 100% clean energy as a goal? By 2045 it was Hawaii. And we are ahead of schedule right now, largely thanks to PV or photovoltaic panels. Now, photovoltaic panels to work effectively efficiently, they've got to be clean. We keep our car windshields clean, don't want to be peering through dirt, and neither do PV panels. How in the world do we keep them clean? We bring in people like Mr. Fred Brooks, president of PacificPanelCleaners.org dot com. He's headquartered in Kaimaki, and at the moment he's cleaning panels on the island of Kauai. So welcome, Fred. Thanks very much, Howard. You're doing a great job for green clean Hawaii. Why don't you tell us a little bit about how long you've been in the business, why you're in the business, and then launch. All right, perfect. So we've been in business now for 14 years. I started my first cleaning company in 2009, and we're based out of Honolulu, and we have full-time crews on Maui and the Big Island. Basically, started up with an idea. I refer to it as it happened BC before children. I was designing and installing systems since I was involved in the photovoltaic industry in Hawaii since 2006. I was there for the giant boom in 2009, and with my background in the engineering department in the United States Navy, everything was maintenance.  Who's taking care of them? So the idea for PacificPanelCleaners was born to be able to go and take care of a couple of systems in the morning, then hope to be able to go out and surf and play in the afternoon. Well, it took about eight and nine years before the word really got out there, but it's been a great go at it. I've been honored to be a pioneer in such a fast-growing industry that's really valuable because one of the biggest things that I saw was we talked about energy and the loss of energy efficiency, and we're installing these solar investments. You need to take care of them. I was privy enough to be on the team that designed the first stage of Punahou, and that was put in 2007, and that was the biggest system in the Hawaiian Islands, $4.6 million. And I said, why not take care of it? Who's going to do it? So that's how it works. So like you said, I'm over on Kauai now. We do maintain systems on all the Hawaiian Islands. We do more than just clean systems. We are a PV asset management company certified on inverters, and we are a thermal imaging company that specializes in PV modules. That's the main gist of it, and I could explain more about it. You've seen our robot in action. We brought the first solar cleaning robot to Kauai, so it's been an incredible journey. I've been very, very fortunate to work with amazing people and teams and a lot of the installers I know, and I've worked with them, and the Hawaii Solar Energy Association has been a phenomenal group to be with, and Association of Energy Engineers. I'm the scholarship director. It's been an amazing journey, and I'm really proud that we're able to know that we've walked in on systems that weren't working, and now they're fully operational and working again. That's a little bit about us and what we do, and yep, out of Kaimuki. And I should do a full disclosure. I am with the Hawaii State Government. Think Tech Hawaii is a nonprofit. Neither of us is authorized to endorse any private company, so Fred and I are here on an educational mission. We are not endorsing his company, and I can speculate that there's probably some other really nice solar panel cleaning companies out there also. So that's just the full disclosure. Now, Fred, one of the graphs that I saw that came out of your house was the increase in performance. There was a graph showing a very low TWH output, and then, boom, all of a sudden it looked like the output doubled. What was that graph all about there? So with our company and a lot of maintenance companies, we have access to system monitoring. That graph that we used was really good graph. It worked with Enphase, so it showed the system immediately and on time. This was a site that we had. It was back in Manoa that was really, really moldy. A lot of black mold built up on it. We thought it would be really neat because we were able to watch the production go up, and his production, I think it tripled with the amount of mold that was on the site. Now, this is, of course, you know, we're going to talk and show the best extreme examples, but we've been tracking a lot of the ones that have the heavy build up and on it, and it starts, they reduce so much, it's incredible. So we have a couple of them that showed up, but the client couldn't believe it. It was really funny because that day we actually did half the system, and then we showed them on his map the half that was clean and the half that was not, and with Enphase, they do different coloring on it. The ones that we cleaned with nice bright blue and the ones we didn't clean were dark black, almost not producing. So we had immediate gratification on that. Without a job, it's really satisfying to be able to go to a system and able to pull out the data and watch the immediate improvement on it. So with that being the extreme condition, the North American Board of Certified Energy Practitioners has given estimate and so has Sandia Laboratories. The idea you get between 15 and 20% increase. NAPS upset about 20%. So on the average, you're going to be, you can get up to between seven and 10 is what I would say. But there's definitely 20% losses and we've had sites with 50, 70% loss from soiling. And with the idea of just going up and cleaning alone is really good. But with the inspecting of the systems, which when companies should go up and clean, they inspect the system as well, you can find other down equipment because over time, if you're not maintaining the other equipment, the equipment can do that. It's just that I would do an analogy of getting your car checked, say at least once a year. You don't just look for the dirty oil or whatever, get an oil change. The mechanic looks at the whole system and says, Mr. Wig, you've got a spark plug missing, if they even use spark plugs anymore. But you know, they check the whole system and what you're indicating is as long as the professionals are up there on the roof, might as well look at everything. Yeah, yeah, since one of the most important parts of our company is the idea started off with just getting up and cleaning. But with my background, I was a quality control inspector in the Navy and I used to help design systems. We started looking out systems were installed. And then with the inspecting of the system became more of a safety concern. Because if you go up there, you got to remember if you're spraying water on solar panels, solar panels make electricity, we want to make sure you do it. Like you said, how do manufacturers all have a recommended guide and they recommend annual cleaning of the inspection. And with the idea of the inspection, you're looking at the whole envelope, not just the dirt on the one side to put it that way. And how about the transformers, the electrical system? So, when you're looking at the electrical system, we pretty much always do, we start our checks by looking at the ground first and working our way up because if some equipment has a ground fault or a major fault, we call it a safety concern and then we're going to have to focus on fixing that problem right then and there. That'll be our biggest concern at that moment. So, there's a variety of different inverters. There's central inverters, string inverters, there's microinverters. So, with our company and with the trainings that I've given and I've written documents and papers on this and explained to people, it's really critical to do an inspection on it. And having your monitoring system is like the easiest thing in the world to look at because you don't even need to go outside. You look at the monitoring system and some of them are so good now, they'll tell you what the fault. So, you're able to do with everything else. You have people trained up that do it. With us, we have trained people, I know there's other organizations that have trained people that specialize in looking at their monitoring for people's systems. And whenever I give trainings, I've held trainings for homeowners or facilities with facilities managers, I state that there's five levels, basically a PV maintenance. And level one, the most critical is know your monitoring system and check it because that's equivalent to having a, you know, a base maker, a heart checker on you. You're checking the system, the system's health right then and there. It's the quickest indicator. Okay. And then you mentioned five. Yep, I mentioned five. So, then the second one, basically, because it goes up in levels of technical terms and diversity. So, then you have the basic monitoring, then you have your system inspection. So, that's a visual inspection. I call it an up and over check or over under check because you look at the electrical equipment from your utility meter, you follow the pipe up, you're just looking to see is it cracked, is it damaged? You know, are the clamps that we're holding it through the wall, are they broken off? And then you get up onto the roof and you look at how the pipe comes into the roof. So, you look at that. Now, you have to remember your PV system isn't just the paddles, it's the racking, it's the, it's the piping. So, you're looking at the piping, you're looking at the racking. So, that's your, your inspection. When we say over under checks, we're looking over the paddles to see if the paddles are cracked, damaged.  So, that's your second one. Pretty much you can get up and do it. If that looks all clear and safe and there's no faults anywhere, then we say go ahead and you can start cleaning your panel. These are all pretty basic. So, the first three, you know, you can get up and take care of them as long as you're following proper safety steps, it's good. The fourth and the fifth one is a little bit more detailed and intense. So, the fourth, the fourth section now requires testing of strings, testing of equipment coming in on the roof because depending on the systems you could test out different strings going to the inverters. And then the fifth one is thermal imaging your entire system. And with thermal imaging, I always recommend having a certified thermographer and someone who specializes in portable tags because they're more aware of what they're actually seeing identifying and that's their specialty item. And I've been honored to be a certified thermographer since 2012. And I've been able to speak at the conferences for FLIR and the Infrared Training Center on the exact subject matter of identifying issues of your portable tag system using thermal imagery. Yep, it's a big mouthful. And I was really honored that when FLIR came out with their first thermal imaging drone, I was contacted and we were able to get our FAA licensing and flying the first thermal imaging drones. And that wasn't too long ago and the technology is really advanced. So, like I said, there's five stages of a PB maintenance package, monitoring is most basic, then it's inspecting, then cleaning, then after that it becomes a little bit more technical. You do it. We help our clients understand it. When we have a client, just say they have properties on six islands, right? So, we come out there and we check in their sites, they have monitoring, we help try to teach or train them on their monitoring plan. So, they're aware as well because one of the big things we do when we try to educate people or when we try to tell people about PB maintenance, we always say it's best if you understand your monitoring as well. And I'm able to teach it, but the monitoring platforms have great great links. They do a lot of YouTube channels and a lot of training on them as well. So, whatever monitoring platform people have, like everything else in this world, we can Google search it and it'll tell you how to use it. So, when you're thermal imaging, what kind of temperatures are you looking for? Are you looking for variations in the temperature? Is there a sweet spot temperature? So, when you're thermal imaging a photovoltaic panel, there's a couple of factors that take into place. One is to have the knowledge level of knowing that a panel has what's called the standard test condition and it's one of the test conditions traded at is a thousand watts per meter square. This has a direct correlation to the current on the pad. So, that'll change the temperature. So, there's not a sweet temperature. So, this is a lot like I tell everybody Sesame Street. Which one of these is not like the other? You have a 60 cell panel. If 59 cells look like one color and one cell is completely different color, that's what we focus on. And then, from there, you're able to take an image and there's tools that can be used that will let you do a differential tempering. So, that's when it starts coming into place. Well, with truth demography on a PV panel, we want to continually take the readings on the irradiance to let us know what we were having at the time. So, we always try, you want to try to have it above 500 watts per meter squared coming in. You don't always get your best test conditions. So, you're looking at that. There's different items you're looking at and that's dealing with the anomaly of a hot spot.  And that gives you different references of what's going on. And this falls back to if you're doing any energy management work or everything else, we always try to train and when we publish our papers on this, we always state it's best you have your photovoltaic investment installed. Within six months, get a baseline thermal scan of the whole system. If there's no anomalies then, you have your baseline. If a year or two later you go, you start finding anomalies, when you try to do a warranty claim, it's going to make more sense to be able to say, well, here's our baseline. Here's the previous year's document documented with the date and time stamp on it. We did not have these anomalies and just say for a commercial site, that's 500 pounds. All of a sudden we found none, found none. Year three, we now find five. We have a one percent variation now. So, our deviations, one percent. And then when we talk with the panel manufacturer, we state we have it. And then there's other testing that goes along with this, but this is your initial visual check on it. With the thermal imaging as well, we've been very fortunate to have learned how to identify if microinverter is out in the location. So, this takes a little bit more identifying and it's a real fine line. We do our testing in centigrade because all the standard test conditions refer to Celsius in centigrade. So, with that being said, we've noticed that you could see it down microinverter optimizer between one to two degrees C. So, it's a very, very tight window, but the thermal cameras have such great projection and able to identify it. You're able to pick these small differences up and when you go through training through the training groups that offer thermal imaging training, they teach you how to lock in, how to identify that, make your camera do what it works. It falls under tools of their usage. Now, this is just a perfect example of the fact that technology, especially electronic technology, is this improving, improving, improving, improving. And then those of us in the renewable energy field, energy efficiency field, this is just nothing but good news because we're getting more for less. The efficacy of whatever system is improving. You just gave a perfect example of that. Yes. And one of the best things now is Leah Wong for our company, she is our head person who runs our drone program. So, we have the certified demographers and certified drone pilots because when you do fly the drone, if it's not for your personal use, you have to make sure your FAA license. And they're specialized in actual thermal imaging use on a drone. So, it's really neat. So, when you do in the drone, so just like, you'll go over and you've got an overall picture, it's fantastic. We'll have sites with 20,000, 40,000 pounds. So, carrying a handheld camera all day long trying to find those problems takes a long time. When they have it mapped out, we're able to identify the anomaly in the location and then you do further close-up inspection with the thermal camera. Is it a bird dropping? Is it a rock that went into the glass? Is that what caused it or is an actual anomaly in the panel themselves? So, it's once again being able to realize that it's a whole collaborative part of a system and all these parts work together really well. And like you said, the advancements that we've had in technology since I started company to clean panels and to maintain its audit has been incredible. There are monitoring platforms that now have such great data. It's incredible. You know, like I said, we've gone from handheld scrubbing every site to now we have sites that we're running our robots on. You know, it's making things safer. We're using lighter robots because there's heavy robots out there but, you know, OSHA regs are trying to use some of the lighter robots to fall into different qualifications. You know, with the thermal imaging drones, it's fantastic. I've been shown through Leah that she's able to build a track of just say, I'm flying at Howard's house.  She runs the same exact pattern. So, that way it falls under the same idea with the base slide and if we have to work with the warranty claim, we could say, this is the same exact location. We found it in the same image area. So, they're able to do things that I just look at. I just up just like, wow, it's so incredible at how far advanced it's come and what they're doing and being able to track the monitoring data, the equipment that's coming out to make a safer and, you know, you go clean 600 pounds with the scrub brush compared to using the robot. You're a lot happier after using the robot. I can tell you that right now. I saw an image, you know, you had a video of a robot. Can you describe what this robot does and how it's mounted? So, there are a variety of robots that have come out and it's been great watching them come out. So, basically it's like a small machine that has treads on it and there'll be two brushes. Some machines have one brush. We have one as two brushes and basically it'll have a water pump that goes to the top. It pumps water to the front and the back of it and as it goes, it cleans up. And if one of the bigger items that we've noticed is it uses less water, so we have less water usage, it performs and cleans it better because the brushes do it. There's different brushes for different soiling. So, that's about the most technical part on it. And then when I first got the robot, I went to see how difficult it would be. So, I, at the time, my daughter was six and I put the battery and I handed it to her and I said, here you go, Cassie, give this a ride. And took her about two minutes to figure out how to drive the robot. So, it's real intuitive. It will do it. There's definite items you have to be aware of, what angles you could run it on, getting closer to the edge. But it's pretty much a joystick. So, gamers are good at it and it's pretty amazing because the drone is the same thing, the robots are the same things. So, it's really cool to have robots. We've got them on a couple islands now.  One is it definitely makes things safer. We're able to work and operate safer. It has less strain on the employee's work and it does a phenomenal job and we've used less water usage. So, there's a lot of bonuses on it. And it's fun to drive a robot. And your six-year-old daughter can do it. My goodness, goodness. And I assume that the brushes spin around the same as a vacuum cleaner, say brush. They rotate, so they have their own motors on each side. And so, the way they have it set up, if the robot, just say the robot is going clockwise, then we move it left to right or whatever. So, you've got a clockwise rotation. You run the brushes in a counterclockwise rotation. So, it pushes everything off and then there's a little squeegee on it that helps wipe everything off as it goes and rinses all the way back.  Wow. So, it's been phenomenal. We make sure we document it before and after images, what do you want to do? So, you track it once again. These are all done because if you're documenting these items, if you ever have a warranty claim, you can prove to people, hey, we've been trying to do the maintenance on them. We've been cleaning them. You know, your maintenance manual, for instance, manufacturer will say, what's your clean inspection? And they'll just say, use a water or a mild detergent. They never tell you what detergent to use, so they won't answer which one's legal. Wow. And drones, how high does the drone slide over the target? I've been with her when she's gotten up to like 350 feet, 400 feet. And she can zoom in. We had one of our sites that she was able to fly, which had, I think it's got 2,400 panels on it. She was able to fly to 350 feet and she was able to see the whole thing and we were able to identify six anomalies from that height without a problem. The clarity that they've developed from the first failure view that I got to use, what we have now is I would quit it to go on from a black and white TV with the knob to now being able to tell Alexa that I want to watch whatever shows on TV and they'll put it on every room I'm walking through. Wow. And we've just got less than two minutes left. I want to talk about the future of PVs. Right now we're really looking hard at something called agro-photovoltaics or something like that, where you put the panels over an agricultural area and the plants are more shade lovers. So they grow better under the panels. I don't know if you've heard about that. Yeah, I've worked with people talked about it. I've actually helped try to develop some ideas on it to actually make it work because of the need on them on a lot of solar farms because you can dual-purpose your sites and the farmers know way better what crops will work underneath it. And it's really an amazing thing to be able to do because I said dual-purposing it is phenomenal and they have different systems that pretty much will run to keep them shaded and running water on them and keeping them cleaned out. It's really phenomenal advancements in technology and a mixing of groups and it's a mixing of the forward-thinking ideas because it's green technology trying to think about our future and farming and food sources and water saving and reclamation is an amazing future.  And Fred, that brings us to the close of our show. We were just kind of getting warmed up. So thank you so much, Fred. Howard and Think Tech Hawaii, thank you very much. Thank you for always putting on phenomenal shows and all that you do. My great pleasure. And to our audience, thank you for attending. See you next time. Think Tech Hawaii. Code green. Aloha.


Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the resolution on the floor of this honourable house today. But before I speak on this resolution, Mr. Speaker, I beg your permission to express my condolences to the people in my constituency who have passed but more so to the people, to the families and friends of Mr. Donnie MacKennan who was murdered in Souffre on Saturday. Mr. Speaker, it is always so difficult to lose a loved one and a friend. But I believe it is critical as a parliamentary rep that I express the feeling of the people of Souffre and my own personal feelings. I also want to take this moment, Mr. Speaker, to wish Mr. Peter Jackson a speedy recovery. Mr. Speaker, today as well, with your permission, I want to recognise the women in this parliament and the women of St. Rusia as we continue within our 16 days of activism against violence. Mr. Speaker, I also want to take this moment to thank the Honourable Prime Minister for his support in recognising gender balance. And in having and electing our first female leader of the Senate, President of the Senate, Mr. Speaker, this is a leader that is telling us that he understands gender balance. Mr. Speaker, on the issue before us, which is the resolution, by the Minister of Finance to borrow U.S. 102,128,298 U.S. dollars or approximately E.C. 276 million dollars from the Export-Import Bank of the Republic of China to provide budgetary support for fiscal year 2022-2023. Mr. Speaker, I listened attentively to the Minister of Finance and Prime Minister as he laid this resolution on the floor of this House. He cited the authority for doing so as Section 63.1A of the Public Finance Act Number 14 of 2020. Secondly, the Honourable Member outlined in detail the purpose of the said loan and some of the reasons he gave funding, as I said, the 2022-2023 budget, part payment for DFCs, which is the design finance construct projects, part payment for land acquisition, payment of local payables, and that is to local suppliers, persons who provide goods and services to the Government of St. Lucia, and to deal with some capital and current expenditure in the estimates. And the Honourable Member as well wrapped this all up in terms of ensuring that this loan would have the effect of economic recovery and growth. But Mr. Speaker, what I really want to speak on today is the last reason, which is the issue of debt reprofiling. Mr. Speaker, the issue of borrowing is of concern to all St. Lucia and consequently it is a national of national importance. So our discussion had today we have to be detailed and deliberate as to why we are coming to this Honourable House to borrow. Because John Public, that's what you're going to see. Why has the Government come in to take another debt? Because we know we are burdened. We inherited a huge portfolio of debt, Mr. Speaker. But so why are we doing this today? So, Mr. Speaker, first I want to make reference to the Prime Minister's budget address of April 26, 2022. And on page 58 of that budget address, Mr. Speaker, page 58 and 59. And if your permission I'll read a paragraph and I'm quoting from page 58, Mr. Speaker, on the debt management. Mr. Speaker, debt is an inescapable reality if we are to finance the capital investment necessary to expand the economy. While COVID-19 provided access to concessionary loans, the current disruption in the global economic environment brought about by the Russia-Ukraine War will result in higher interest rates making borrowing more expensive. Mr. Speaker, we will be frank and honest with the people of Saint Lucia about our debt position. The current level of public debt now stands at 90.6% of GDP or $4.13 billion. The debt stock includes central government debt, government-guaranteed debt, and public sector debt. But a paragraph that is more important, Mr. Speaker, and I'll read it now. It says the preferred route to bringing public debt under control is to generate surpluses on the primary account. In the current circumstances, this is not likely. And therefore, my government's immediate debt policy strategy is to reduce its dependence on short-term high-interest borrowing through the use of treasury bills and to pursue long-term financing with lower interest rates from multilateral agencies, financial institutions, and friendly governments. End of quote, Mr. Speaker. These are the words of the Prime Minister and Minister of Finance. So today what we are doing is just that, Mr. Speaker. This loan, and when I look at the estimate of revenue and expenditure for 2022-2023, and I go over to pages 650 to 653, which outlines in great detail the domestic debt, and that is the local debt, Mr. Speaker. And there, the balance, as of December 31, 2021, stood at $1.5 billion, Mr. Speaker. The end of importance is the interest payments of $107,666,856, Mr. Speaker. That is the interest on our debt annually. So the minister and as a government, the minister of finance had to look at ways to manage this. This is what we are doing today. This is part of our consolidation and reprofiling. And, Mr. Speaker, when I go through pages 60 to 65, in the estimate, the interest rates for our local debts and the honorable member presented this in some reform when he presented, the interest rates, 7.5, 7.5, 6%, 6.8%. And in some cases, these bonds and treasury bills are short term, Mr. Speaker. So today, the minister, we are doing what the minister of finance said he was going to do. And the proposal before us is to take a long-term loan, 20 years, including five years grace period. So, Mr. Speaker, the minister also outlined in some detail what he's going to do with the funds. And he indicated that in addition to meeting the capital expenditure from the estimate, he's going to pay land acquisition, part payment, local purchases, and part payment of DFCs, Mr. Speaker. So what I have done is to try to get a listing of our local payables, Mr. Speaker. And as at November 30th, 2022, we have the debt of approximately 132 million in local payables. That is saying that we are owing for rent.  But what is important, Mr. Speaker, is that almost 64 million of this debt are very old debts, Mr. Speaker. And it is critical. It is critical in repositioning that our government pays some of these payables. It is critical. Secondly, when I got the listing for land acquisition, Mr. Speaker, and I've got three schedules here, there's a schedule where the cabinet has approved, and there are about 31 persons of and they are large landowners, totaling some $27 million, Mr. Speaker. 31. We have for small land owners another 45, Mr. Speaker. And then we have another schedule with another 36. And these acquisitions were for maybe infrastructural works like facing water tanks and things like that. Mr. Speaker, when I look at those persons, they are from all around. This schedule I have there, and I'll not call the names of the people. They are from Zephyesikwe, Millet, Ansleray, Vana, Lahou, Ansleray, Boyden, Souffre, Vierlit, Viewfort, Belfort, Souffre, Montparnasse, Tomazou, Boyden. It is telling us that persons throughout the country are waiting with better breath for some soulagement, for debt that previous governments encountered, but we as a government must continue and we must pay it, Mr. Speaker. The same goes for part payments of DFCs, Mr. Speaker. And if you have permission, when I look at the schedule that I received for DFCs, Mr. Speaker, I'm looking at a schedule as of last year. The total DFCs are $177 million, Mr. Speaker. Some $84 million was paid. The balance at the moment is some $114 million, Mr. Speaker. And that is design, finance, construct. These are commitments by the previous administration, but as a government, our prime minister continued to tell us we do not have to pay attention as to which administration incurred the debt, but it is a debt of the government of Central Asia. And we, as a government, should pay it. So, Mr. Speaker, the critical thing for us and to me, the critical message for the public today is that with this debt re-profiling, this government stands as an economy to save some $40 million in interest payments. To me, as a finance person, this is the most important message from what we are doing today, apart from ensuring that some of these managers get back into the economy and the persons paid can invest and we can see growth in the economy. For central government, we are saving some $40 million in debt expenditure, simply by having a long-term view on this debt, a debt that has given us a longer period to pay and at a lower interest rate. So, Mr. Speaker, I stand here and I say to the people of Senkusha, you have a government that is focused on efficiency, that is focused on good governance, and I support this resolution, wholeheartedly, Mr. Speaker. Thank you.


It is the night before clinicals for us as nursing students in the simulation lab right here on Marquette's campus. This is a beautiful facility that was completely renovated by GE and is now state-of-the-art, which is awesome, and for our use as future nurses. So you guys get to come along with me and check out what our simulation lab has to offer. The arts of our sim lab is getting to practice on the walls works. We learn how to chart.  Thanks for watching and I'll see you guys again soon.


re asking questions and doing some demonstration because I was running out of things to say well I mean that you've you've got such a sort of mind of information and knowledge and stuff like that like I never realized that you you you worked for Sony before and Apple and stuff like that it's uh oh yeah it's amazing I'm just thinking of all like the potential content and things like that that you could uh you know you could do videos on I'm sure there's there's an endless resource it's just sort of thinking about a few titles I caught I caught Doc's uh show this afternoon and he did he did quite a congratulatory speech on our our stream last night oh I love to go back and watch that he he he put up a picture of you and I ah that's nice and and it just it made me feel so good I tell you that man is is really a hero to me a me too certainly certainly you have been a wonderful hero but if it hadn't been for him I don't I never would have gotten started in this I don't know where I would be psychologically today I'm right with you he's definitely my coach is how he always signs off his videos you know I'm Doc Rock your content creation coach or you know in a lot of them and that's totally how I think of him well coach and mentor actually check out that video because he usually starts out by saying hello to everybody that's in the chat yeah and uh when he got to me he just went off with a tangent like oh god thank you so much yeah and and he even told me to come to Hawaii yeah yeah and I'm going we'll have to have a meet-up yeah so anyway I'm I'm going to sign off because he's he needs to uh go outside and uh I already been outside when I did my problem is I sit here uh or the camera's over there I see you're drinking and uh it runs right through me so anyway thanks so much my friend my best to you and your family okay take care thank you Michael sign off and thank you I will sign off for now bye bye see you soon Michael bye bye well uh yeah thank you everyone for coming and hanging out it was great to see you all here some new people and some uh old faces as well not old faces obviously but you know what I mean and watch out Rich has got a wrench now so I'll have to go and add a few more other people in there as well we'll have a we'll have a whole team behind us in future so yeah that's all for this this video but if you got any specific questions about the ecum live uh ecum live update which is what we were talking about originally wasn't it or if you've got any interesting questions about the differences between American English and English English and then let me know about those as well and uh I'll leave it there for the moment because here Mike little kids waking up so uh that is all for today and until the next time have an absolutely wonderful day and I will speak to you all very soon have a great day everyone bye bye that's it we've got the strong arms rich cool bye bye everyone