TRIESTE, Italy, and BELLINGHAM, Washington, USA -- Lasers and related research directions, applications in in healthcare and manufacturing, and technology transfer claimed the attention of students and faculty from nearly 40 countries at the 2013 Winter College on Optics at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, 4-15 February. SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, is among eight organizations that co-sponsor the annual event and other ICTP programs to meet the needs of students and scientists in developing countries.
Directors were Roberta Ramponi (Politecnico di Milano), SPIE Fellow Fernando Mendoza Santoyo (Centro de Investigaciones en Optica, Mexico), and Fredrik Laurell (Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden). Local organizers were Joseph Niemela (ICTP) and Miltcho Bojanov Danailov (Sincrotrone Trieste).
The 21 faculty from 9 countries included SPIE Fellows Paolo de Natale (Istituto Nazionale di Ottica), Anna Consortini (University of Firenze), and Vasudevan (Vengu) Lakshminarayanan (University of Waterloo); and SPIE Past Presidents Malgorzata Kujawinska (Warsaw University of Technology) and Katarina Svanberg.
Highlights included a visit to Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste facility, presentation of the 2013 ICO/ICTP Gallieno Denardo Award to Mohammad Dhafer Al-Amri (National Centre for Mathematics and Physics, King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology) and a report on the Laboratory for Lasers and Optical Fibres (LFO), which is involved in the development of the ultrafast laser systems for the Elettra project.
Winners of the best paper prizes, sponsored by SPIE, were Magdalena Ulmeanu (Romania), Artur Aleksanyan (Armenia), and SPIE member Ekaterina Zlobina (Russian Federation). A special Innovation and Enterprise Award went to Sergii Kukhtin (Ukraine).
In addition to $5,000 in support of the Optics Winter College, SPIE provides $30,000 annually to support an optics staff position at ICTP. In conjunction with ICTP, SPIE provides free SPIE Digital Library papers for participating countries through the eJDS program, and helps fund a laboratory pursuing novel research in spectroscopy with quantum cascade lasers, available to participants from developing nations. The lab is housed at the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nuclear (INFN) and run in collaboration with the Institute for Nanoelectronics, Technische Universität München.
A new project in optical tweezers was started in quantum cascade laser (QCL) Anchor Optics Research Program supported by SPIE as well as ICTP and INFN has involved researchers from several developing countries.
SPIE is the international society for optics and photonics, a not-for-profit organization founded in 1955 to advance light-based technologies. The Society serves nearly 225,000 constituents from approximately 150 countries, offering conferences, continuing education, books, journals, and a digital library in support of interdisciplinary information exchange, professional networking, and patent precedent. SPIE provided over $3.2 million in support of education and outreach programs in 2012.
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