GaN lasers tutorial set for Fall MRS meeting
Toby Strite
The GaN and Related Materials Symposium at this year`s Fall Materials Research Society meeting (MRS; Boston, MA: Dec. 1-5) will feature a first-of-its-kind tutorial on industrial applications of gallium nitride (GaN) diode lasers in response to the rapid progress and growing commercial interest in these devices. Shuji Nakamura of Nichia Chemical Industries (Tokyo, Japan) will open the tutorial session with a review of his group`s pioneering GaN laser development, including the first room-temperature continuous-wave (CW) GaN laser with a lifetime of more than 100 hours.
The three speakers following him come from outside the GaN community and will talk about market opportunities for GaN lasers in their fields. They will also explain to the material scientists and device engineers attending the tutorial the specifications those lasers must meet. Projection displays will be covered by Robert Melcher of IBM (Yorktown Heights, NY). Akito Iwamoto of the Multi-media Laboratory of Toshiba (Kawasaki, Japan) will discuss the widely anticipated shift to blue and shorter wavelengths in the optical recording industry. The future of GaN lasers in print and imaging applications will be described by Robert Bringans of Xerox PARC (Palo Alto, CA).
Since its foundation in 1995, the GaN and Related Materials Symposium has developed into the premier GaN meeting of the year, as well as the largest symposium by far at the Fall MRS meeting. This year`s symposium is being held in honor of Prof. Jacques Pankove of Astralux Corp. (Boulder, CO), who in the late 1960s invented the GaN light-emitting diode (LED) while working at RCA Laboratories (Princeton, NJ). Special festivities, including a Thursday evening banquet for Prof. Pankove, are planned. Roughly 250 abstract submissions have been received, of which only 27 invited and 53 contributed papers will be presented at the symposium. Among the invited papers is at least one from each of the five groups in the world currently achieving GaN diode laser operation. To accommodate the overwhelming demand, evening poster sessions will also be held.
Preregistration for the MRS Fall meeting is available until Nov. 14. See the MRS World Wide Web page at http://www.mrs.org for complete information about the Fall meeting. Information about the GaN and Related Materials Symposium is available on the Web at http://www.zurich.ibm.com/pub/srt/mrssympd.