SPIE Optics + Optoelectronics in Prague, 24-27 April, will feature 17 conferences, five top laser scientists speaking at three plenary sessions, a two-day exhibition, and a tribute to the late Wolfgang Sandner, director general of the consortium that opened the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) Beamlines laser facility in Prague in October 2016.
Conferences and workshops at the symposium will highlight technologies related to some of the world’s most advanced laser facilities, including the ELI Beamlines facility, the recently commissioned European XFEL facility in Germany, the UK Central Laser Facility (CLF); and others in Europe.
Carlo Rizzuto, current director of the ELI Delivery Consortium (ELI-DC) International Association, will lead the tribute to Sandner at the first plenary session Monday, 24 April. Sandner, who died in December 2015, had been on the steering committee for SPIE Optics + Optoelectronics 2015 and made major contributions to advancing laser technologies.
ELI Beamlines is expected to open for user experiments in 2018.
The Monday plenary session will have talks by Jonathan D. Zuegel from the University of Rochester Laboratory for Laser Energetics (USA) and SPIE Fellow Kishan Dholakia, a professor at University of St Andrews (UK).
SPIE Fellow Demetri Psaltis of Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland) will give a talk on multimode fibers for optical systems at the Tuesday session.
The Wednesday plenary session and a panel discussion following it will feature Robert Feidenhans’l of the European XFEL and Constantin L. Haefner from the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Lab (USA). Ric Allott, president of the Association of Industrial Laser Users (UK), will moderate the discussion.
Other special events and activities during the week include a tour of the optical fiber technology lab at the Institute of Photonics and Electronics and the awarding of the Rozhdestvensky Optical Society’s Yuri Denisyuk Medal to Miroslav Miler. Miler, a professor at the Institute, is being honored for his achievements in holography.
An exhibition of approximately 30 companies and organizations runs Tuesday and Wednesday at the Clarion Congress Hotel. A poster session will occur on Wednesday and there will be a workshop on Thursday covering intense, high-average-power lasers.
More than 700 presentations in the conferences and workshop will cover developments in optical sensors, petawatt photonics, high-power and high-repetition rate systems, diode pumped laser systems, coherent X-ray sources, metamaterials, and free electron lasers (FELs), along with recent advances in holography, X-ray optics, and nonlinear and quantum optics.
Symposium chairs are SPIE Fellow Jiří Homola of the Institute of Photonics and Electronics; SPIE member Mike Dunne of the SLAC National Accelerator Lab/Linac Coherent Light Source (USA); Chris Edwards from the CLF Science & Technology Facilities Council (UK); Bedřich Rus from ELI Beamlines and the Institute of Physics (Czech Republic); and Ivo Rendina from CNR/Istituto per la Microelettronica e Microsistemi (Italy).
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