Laser Energy Experts at SPIE Optics+Optoelectronics

A two-day workshop on laser energy projects in Europe and the United States will complement 17 conferences, nearly 700 presentations, and a two-day exhibition at SPIE Optics+Optoelectronics in Prague, 13-16 April.

Invited speakers at the workshop will update attendees on experiments and developments with the High Power laser for Energy Research (HiPER) project, the National Ignition Facility in the US, Laser Megajoule in France, and other campaigns to achieve inertial fusion energy. (More on these laser facilities.)

Presentations will also be made at the workshop on Orion and the Central Laser Facility in the UK, diode-pumped solid-state laser (DPSSL) technology, and related topics.

In the conference rooms all week, scientists and industry representatives will present their latest work on petawatt photonics, high-power and high-repetition-rate systems, free-electron lasers, optical sensing, holography, X-ray optics, metamaterials, and nonlinear and quantum optics.

Opening the week of activities will be Jiří Drahoš, president of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, and SPIE President-Elect Robert Lieberman of Lumoptix (USA).

Lieberman will present the the 2015 SPIE Early Career Achievement Award to Miriam Serena Vitiello, OF NEST, CNR Nanoscience Institute and Scuola Normale (Italy). The inaugural award has an academic focus and recognizes her outstanding results in research on semiconductor laser sources and electronic high-frequency nanodetectors, which have opened new frontiers in terahertz photonics and optoelectronics.

Plenary speakers and the topics they will discuss are:

• Ferenc Krausz, director of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics and chair of experimental physics at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Germany), next-generation femtosecond and attosecond technology
• SPIE Fellow Peter Moulton, principal research scientist and retired CTO at Q-Peak, (USA), ultra high-peak-power laser systems
• SPIE member Sang-Hyun Oh, associate professor at University of Minnesota (USA), new approaches for engineering metallic nanostructures for plasmonics and optoelectronics
• Andrea Melloni, associate professor at Politecnico di Milano (Italy), photonic integrated circuits (PICs)

Symposium chairs are SPIE Fellow Jiří Homola of the Institute of Photonics and Electronics of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic; Chris Edwards from the Central Laser Facility, Science & Technology Facilities Council (UK); SPIE member Mike Dunne of the SLAC National Accelerator Lab/Linac Coherent Light Source (USA); and Ivo Rendina from CNR/Istituto per la Microelettronica e Microsistemi (Italy).

The honorary chair is SPIE Senior Member Miroslav Miler of the Institute of Photonics and Electronics (Czech Republic).

The SPIE Optics+Optoelectronics exhibition in the Clarion Congress Hotel will be held Tuesday and Wednesday, 14-15 April.

More information: spie.org/EOO.

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