News from the European Optical Society

EOS Annual Meeting 2014 in Berlin

From 16 to 19 September 2014 the bi-annual conference of the EOS, the EOSAM2014, will be held in Berlin. This year, EOSAM returns to Germany, a country with a long tradition in optics and photonics. It has a number of leading research institutions dedicated to the field, such as several Max Planck and Fraunhofer institutes. Today, Germany’s flourishing high-tech photonics industry employs approximately 150,000 people. Berlin is therefore a great place to be for EOSAM2014. We are very happy that we will be hosted by the excellent conference facilities of the high-tech park Adlershof in the south-east of the German capital.

The area of Adlershof has a rich history of science and technology. It counts as the birth place of German aviation and it still hosts the German Aerospace Center DLR. Before the German re-unification several institutes of the East German Academy of Science built the first science center in this area. Today it stands for a Science and Technology Park with more than 15,000 people working in 445 companies and 10 non-university research institutes. Among these research institutes are the Ferdinand Braun Institute for High Frequency Technology, the Max Born Institute for Non-Linear Optics and Ultrafast Spectroscopy and the division of PTB, the German Metrology Institute, focusing on photon radiometry. Ten years ago the Humboldt University completed the move of six faculties (including physics, chemistry and IT) to its Adlershof campus, which gave the area a final boost to become Germany’s largest science park.

The scientific chair of the 2014 conference will be Dr. Rainer Schuhmann of Berliner Glas KGaA, a former president of the German society for applied Optics DGaO.

The EOSAM2014 will take place in the buildings of Adlershof Con.vent Centre, Rudower Chaussee 17 in Berlin-Adlershof (www.adlershof-convent.de). The EOS will organize a trade show in parallel where optics and photonics industry can promote and show their products to the participants of the conference.

The following sessions will be held:

1. Telecom Optics.

2. Silicon Photonics (PICs, optical computing, monolithic and hybrid optical sources and detectors, assembly and packaging).

3. Optical Design and Tolerancing (including both imaging and non-imaging optics).

4. Biophotonics and Medical Optics.

5. Meta-materials: fundamentals and applications (transformation optics, optical cloaking, hyperbolic media, super-resolution imaging).

6. Optical technology for Cinematography and Video (optics for digital cinematography, camera and projection technology for cinema and video etc.).

7. Organic Photonics (light-manipulating organic materials and devices, organic photovoltaic, organic semiconductors for sensing, OLEDs).

8. Adaptive and Active Optics.

9. Optical Metrology and Sensing.

10. Special Session on Challenges in Optics.

Session 6 is inspired by various film universities and the presence of the ten film studios at Adlershof, including the Mega-Studios G+H. During the conference there will also be some special events related to optical devices and means in cinema and film-making.

The Forum Adlershof is one of the event locations. The main conference center is across the street. The two heads in the foreground symbolize the famous Humboldt brothers, a reference to the buildings of the Humboldt University which surround this plaza (Photo: WISTA MG).

Since the beginning of 2013 the EOS has an Industrial Advisory Committee (IAC) chaired by Willi Ulrich of Carl Zeiss. In the meantime, representatives of many important European companies joined the IAC. The EOS intends to play a more important role for the European industry related to optics and photonics. This is reflected in the selected topics, in particular Sessions 1, 2, 3 and 9. We furthermore plan to organize lectures on special topics on Monday 15 September, one day before the conference starts. These lectures will be very relevant for those who want to learn more about a topic or who are newcomers in a certain field such as PhDs in their starting phase.

So EOSAM2014 will be an exciting conference in an exciting city. We hope to welcome many of you.