Development of optical fiber technology in Poland 2015
The paper is a digest of works presented during the XVIth National Symposium on Optical Fibres and Their Applications. The Symposium is organized since 1976. OFTA 2015 was organized by Optical Fibre Laboratory of the Faculty of Chemistry at University of Maria Curie Skłodowska, and Institute of Electronics and Information Technology of Lublin University of Technology, in Nałęczów on 22-25 September 2015. The meeting has gathered around 120 participants who presented 85 research and technical papers. The Symposium organized every 18 months is a good portrait of optical fibre technology development in Poland at university laboratories, governmental institutes, company R&D laboratories, etc. Topical tracks of the Symposium were: optical and photonic materials, technology of classical, tailored and structural photonic optical fibres, light propagation physics in optical fibres, passive and active optical fibre components, optical fibre sensors, passive and active optical fibre networks, optical fibre amplifiers and lasers, optical fibre network issues: modulation, architectures, economy, etc.
LCLS – Large Laser Infrastructure Development and Local Implications
The most powerful now in the world, American X-ray laser LCLS (Linac Coherent Light Source), has been working as a research and user facility  since 2009.  It is further developed to LCLS II machine at the Stanford National Accelerator Laboratory SLAC in Menlo Park CA. In a certain sense, LCLS II is a response to the EXFEL machine and a logical extension of LCLS. All these machines are light sources of the fifth generation. EXFEL is expected to open user facility in 2016, at a cost of over  1 mld Euro. LCLS II, which design started in 2010, will be operational in 2017. The lasers LCLS, LCLS II and EXFEL use SASE and SEED methods to generate light and are powered by electron linacs, LCLS by a warm one, and EXFEL by a cold one. The linacs have energies approaching 20 GeV, and are around 2 - 3 km in length. EXFEL linac uses SRF TESLA microwave cavity technology at 1,3GHz. A prototype of EXFEL was FLASH laser. SLAC Laboratory uses effectively over 50 years experience in research, building and exploitation of linear electron accelerators. In 2009, a part of the largest 3 km SLAC linac was used to build the LCLS machine. For the LCLS II machine a new infrastructure is build for two new laser beams and a number of experimental stations. A number of experts and young researchers from Poland participate in the design, construction and research of the biggest world linear and elliptical accelerators and FEL lasers like LCLS (Stanford), EXFEL (DESY) and CEBAF (JLab), and a few more. The paper concentrates on the development state-of-the-art of large laser infrastructure and its global and local impact, in the competitive world of R&D. LCLS infrastructure implications in Poland are considered.
Thermal Conductivity of Toluene+Cyclopentane Mixtures: Measurements and Prediction
New measurements of the thermal conductivity of toluene, cyclopentane, and a binary mixture of 60 wt% toluene are presented. The measurements cover the temperature range from 235 to 345 K and from the saturation line up to 20 MPa pressure. The measurements were performed with a transient hot-wire instrument. The uncertainty of the measurements is estimated to be ±0.5%. The present results are employed to examine the predictive power of a theoretically based scheme for the calculation of the transport properties of mixtures.