A busy season

A quick glance at this year’s events calendar, which you can find on our ­newly ­redesigned Web site, reveals an impressive array of conferences during the first quarter covering many aspects of optics and photonics ranging from ­medicine to ­communications and from lasers to imaging systems. One of my favorite events is the Photonics West conference held in San Jose, CA, last month; but hard on its heels comes the Advanced Solid-State Photonics Conference in Austria, and the newly combined OFC/NFOEC telecommunications conference in Anaheim, CA (previewed on p. 83). The decision to combine OFC and NFOEC was an outgrowth of the struggle that’s taken place in optical communications markets over the past few years. But ­readers of this year’s annual review and forecast of the laser ­markets will find that laser sales for telecom applications are apparently now on the road to recovery, with revenues growing in 2004 for the first time since 2000 (see p. 69).

One factor behind the renewed increase in sales of ­lasers for optical communications is the continuing growth of the Internet. Though the Web as we know it today is only about 10 years old, it has quickly become an indispensable ingredient of many aspects of our ­daily lives-both professional and personal-and it’s becoming more so each day. Recognizing this, a new regular column, “Working the Web,” by associate editor Gail Overton, debuts this month and will, over the next year, survey what the World Wide Web has to offer optics and photonics engineers, researchers, and technical professionals. Gail starts this month with a look at the online tools available for finding a new job (see p. 59).

Elsewhere in this issue we provide a detailed look at the leading edge of ­solid-state ultraviolet-source development (see p. 95), and another feature highlights work to produce a compact interferometer based on optofluidics-you can find out more about optofluidics on p. 101. A novel aspect to image scanning is shown on our cover this month. The flexible scanner was developed by researchers at the University of Tokyo (see p. 15). No doubt all these topics and many more will be discussed at the many upcoming conferences in 2005. I hope we’ll see you there.