Appeal No. 2005-2111 11
Application No. 09/827,454
phase conjugation properties of the four-wave mixing process (principal brief-page 18).
This is also not disputed by the examiner.
Appellant concludes that because of these disparate teachings,
to substitute features from the Vasil’ev...system into the Watanabe
reference systems would not have any reasonable expectation of
success and therefore not be merely a design choice because the
features chosen in the respective references were chosen to produce
the respective effects of removing chromatic dispersion effects
(Watanabe), or exploiting temporal phase conjugation properties
(Vasil’ev...). It necessarily follows that the mirror as taught in
MacDonald would not be utilized in a reference such as Watanabe
that neither teaches, suggests or motivates one of ordinary skill in the
art to utilize the embodiments of Watanabe in a confocal resonator
design as disclosed in MacDonald and then make a further combination
with Vasil’ev...
While appellant’s argument appears reasonable to us, the examiner offers no
reasonable rebuttal, but merely reiterates the rejection and reminds us that MacDonald is
applied only as a teaching that mirrors may direct light between elements in an optical
system including light sources and phase conjugation (answer-pages 32-33). But the
examiner offers no convincing rationale as to why the skilled artisan would have sought to
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