‘The World of Photonics Congress’ is expected to draw 20,000 to a smorgasbord of conferences and exhibitions.
Laser 2005 and The European Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO/Europe) are again collocated in Munich, Germany-where from June 13 to 16, the city is viewed not only as the beer capital of the world, but also as the European mecca for professionals in the laser and optoelectronics community. The Laser 2005 exhibition and conference is branded “The World of Photonics Congress” this year by Munich Trade Fairs International, and includes the Laser 2005 exhibition and CLEO/Europe and associated conferences. Laser 2005 will display the newest innovations from more than 880 corporations and academic/research institutions to more than 20,000 visitors, while conference sessions for CLEO/Europe will cover topics ranging from solid-state, semiconductor, and fiber lasers to nonlinear, micro-, and ultrafast optics, to biophotonics and photonic nanostructures.
CLEO/Europe is held in conjunction with the European Quantum Electronics Conference (EQEC), which features the fundamentals of quantum optics and related research in lasers, nonlinear optics, and fundamental laser spectroscopy of atoms and condensed matter. Also being held at the same time are the European Conference on Biomedical Optics (ECBO), Lasers in Manufacturing 2005, and FiberComm 2005, encompassing the entire fiberoptics industry and presenting international developments and trends in the fields of optical information and communications. All collocated conferences will share a common registration that will allow attendees access to all conference forums and exhibitions.
Laser 2005 exhibition
Laser is organized with specific areas for different sectors of the industry, making it easy for attendees target an area of interest within the 33,000 m2 of floor space in three halls.
This year, the Laser 2005 exhibition will feature live demonstrations on “Photons in Production,” which will highlight hybrid welding, laser-beam forming, and laser heads for remote processing, as well as the “Photonics Forum Talking Trends,” in which key industry representatives will describe the latest trends and innovations in photonics. Other sessions will focus on education and training in optical technologies, technology transfer of optical technologies, and an analysts’ conference together with Spectaris (Berlin, Germany), the German Industry Association for Optical, Medical and Mechatronical Technologies that provides lobbying, market research and statistics, technology consultation, and the promotion of activities abroad for European companies.
The CLEO/Europe conference is viewed as one of the most prestigious and well-respected conferences in the photonics industry.
If the plenary session, “Fiber Lasers and Amplifiers - Status and Perspectives” by Andreas Tünnermann of the Friedrich Schiller University (Jena, Germany), is any indication, fiber lasers will be a major topic at this year’s conference. In addition, “High Power Fiber Lasers and Amplifiers” is one of two Tech-Focus sessions, which are full- or half-day special sessions that try to bridge the gap between industry and academia through targeted tutorials and discussion panels
Within the Tech-Focus session on high-power fiber lasers, Monica L. Minden, research program manager in the Lasers and Applications Department of Hughes Research Laboratories (HRL; Malibu, CA) will present “Coherent Combining of Fiber Lasers” (see Fig. 1). The nonlinear self-organization approach and other power-combining approaches will be reviewed in light of new experiments showing that high power brings different challenges and possibilities to coherent combining than were first anticipated. “Fiber-laser technology has now proven that a single-mode beam with more than 1 kW of output power can readily be obtained from an ytterbium-doped fiber,” says Yoonchan Jeong, researcher at the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton (Southampton, England), who will present a paper, “State of the Art of CW Lasers.”
Also in the session, Eugene Shcherbakov, of IPG Laser (Burbach, Germany) will present “New Achievements in Development of Superpower Industrial Fiber Lasers and Their Applications,” which details 2-kW, CW single-mode and 20-kW multimode ytterbium (Yb) fiber lasers for cutting, welding, sintering, engraving, and materials processing.
The other Tech-Focus session, “Optical Storage,” will include presentations detailing the fourth generation of optical storage-what will come after Blu-ray, digital video disk (DVD), and compact-disk (CD) storage techniques. This special session includes a presentation by Min Gu, director of the Centre for Micro-Photonics at Swinburne University of Technology (Victoria, Australia), “Multidimensional Optical Data Storage,” or the storage of information by using quantum-dot nanocrystals (see Fig. 2).
