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Impressions from the EOSAM 2018
The Netherlands is a small and green country. When traveling there by train (which is most convenient) you see dairy farms and old towns with red brick houses. The Netherlands is less than a third the size of the state of New York, yet, it has a very strong photonics community and a few companies that even dominate world markets.
My reason for this journey was to attend the Annual Meeting of the European Optical Society (EOS) in Delft. Different to the American optical societies, the EOS is a federation of regional societies with just a small central organization. The EOS holds a number of topical meetings and every second year organizes its EOSAM conference as their biggest convention.
The 2018 conference was organized by Paul Urbach, a professor at the University of Technology Delft (TU Delft), and his team. They were joined by Co-chair Stefan Baeumer from TNO, an organization that I will introduce later.
Stefan Baeumer, a graduate of the Technical University in Berlin, made his career in the Netherlands and so he is a good partner to talk about the photonics community with. Stefan has been with Philips, the former Dutch electronics and photonics giant for many years. ‘They have done a lot in the field of optics, but in recent years they shifted to other fields, mainly healthcare’.
Focused on consumer products and health care, today Philips employs about 74 000 people. This is the direction that Philips moved in when profits for TV sets and mobile audio devices (remember the Walkman?) vanished. Philips Lighting, once the biggest lighting business in the world, was turned into a spin-off and renamed as Signify BV just a few months ago. Today the company looks very successful and still has good competence in the optics industry, which distinguishes them from competitors that sadly disappeared.
Founded in 1984 and nurtured in the Philips ecosystem, ASML is the actual ‘elephant in the room’ here. ‘ASML sells German optics with Dutch precision mechanics,’ Stefan explained to me. With large objectives from Carl Zeiss SMT (where they bought a 1 billion Euro stake) and their own wafer stepper systems they dominate the world market for lithography systems. EUV lithography is just taking off there. They hired 341 new people only recently in September and plan to add 3000 new staff within 1 year, so an ASML official told me during EOSAM2018.
When asked about the future of EUV, Martin van den Brink, the CTO of ASML answered in a recent interview: ‘We know what we’ll be doing for the next 10 years’.
A strong and well-connected academic infrastructure
As I write this, I sit in the cafeteria of the TU Delft, a nice place with excellent coffee, comfy couches and many wall sockets as I happily acknowledge. The Netherlands has an excellent academic infrastructure. The TU Delft with its Department of Imaging Physics is just one photonics hotspot. You will find others for photonic integration (Eindhoven), biomedical imaging (Rotterdam, Amsterdam) and many more. If you talk quantum, they have QuTech here, an advanced research center for quantum computing and the quantum Internet, a collaboration founded by the TU Delft and the TNO research institute.
Paul Urbach, Co-chair of the EOS conference and head of the Optics Research Group of TU Delft is one of the researchers who work on the cutting edge of measurement technology for lithography systems. ‘Often, we are not really imaging, we are rather sensing and retrieving’. This is how he uses methods such as computational imaging to push the resolution of optical imaging methods far beyond the classical resolution limits, while incorporating a priori knowledge.
For students they want to offer bi-national tracks: universities in Jena (Germany) and Delft (NL) plan to offer a common Master’s education on imaging and quantum technologies. ‘We did this without EU money,’ Paul confesses with a smile. On board are the industry partners ASML and Carl Zeiss plus Fraunhofer IOF in Jena and TNO in Delft.
Two years ago, the Dutch Optics Centre (DOC) was founded here as an initiative of TNO and TU Delft. It also became an institute of TU Delft. It aims to stimulate applied optics research and to help the Dutch optics industry with innovations in photonics. Besides defining research projects, in which academic optics groups and companies from all over the Netherlands participate, DOC helps in valorizing R&D results into projects with high technology readiness levels.
As regards TNO: located on the TU Delft campus it is a 150 people organization that commercializes opto-mechatronic research results for industrial applications. Stefan Baeumer explains: ‘We are somehow like Fraunhofer, just with that special Dutch flavor’. That is, a small local organization with a global outreach, for instance, in the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) project or several satellite missions.
Last but not least, I should say a few words about the conference: EOSAM has traditionally close ties with the optics industry and so this year’s program was again organized around core topics such as optical systems design, tolerancing and manufacturing. Of course, the 1-week program included much more than that: tutorials, eight tracks, great plenaries and student prizes and last but not least a session on challenges in photonics on ‘Controlling the energy density of light in 3D nanostructures’ and ‘The dawn of quantum networks’.
Whether this comes to light sooner or rather later, the next EOSAM meeting is certain and will be held in autumn 2020 in Porto, Portugal.
More than 400 people attended this year’s EOSAM meeting in the historical Dutch city of Delft, which is famous for its blue pottery (Dutch: Delfts blauw). The conference dinner was held at the ‘Delft Blue’ Pottery Factory and Museum.
Conference Calendar
November
OSA Laser Congress
Advanced Solid State Lasers Conference
Laser Application Conference
Boston, MA, USA
4–8 November 2018
www.osa.org/Meetings/Global_Calendar/Events/Advanced_Solid_State_Lasers_Conference
OSA Light, Energy and the Environment Congress
Optical Nanostructures and Advanced Materials for Photovoltaics (PV), Optics and Photonics for Energy & the Environment (E2), Optics for Solar Energy (SOLAR), Solid-State Lighting (SSL)
Sentosa Island, Singapore
5–8 November 2018
www.osa.org/en-us/meetings/osa_meetings/osa_light_energy_and_the_environment_congress/
VISION
Stuttgart, Germany
06–08 November 2018
www.messe-stuttgart.de/vision/en/
Optics and Photonics for Energy & the Environment
Sentosa Island, Singapore
5–8 November 2018
www.osa.org/Meetings/Global_Calendar/Events/Optics_and_Photonics_for_Energy_the_Environment
2019
January
SPIE Photonics West
San Francisco, CA, USA
2–7 February 2019
Exhibition: 5–7 February 2019
February
SPIE Advanced Lithography
San Jose, CA, USA
24–28 February 2019
March
OFC
San Diego, CA, USA
3–7 March 2019
April
5. UKP-Workshop
Aachen, Germany
10–11 April 2019
OSA Biophotonics Congress: Optics in the Life Sciences
Tucson, AR, USA
15–17 April 2019
May
CLEO
San Jose, CA, USA
5–10 May 2019
June
Optical Interference Coatings
Santa Ana Pueblo, NM, USA
2–7 June 2019
www.osa.org/Meetings/Topical_Meetings/Optical_Interference_Coatings
OSA Optical Design and Fabrication Congress
Washington, DC, USA
10–12 June 2019
www.osa.org/Meetings/OSA_Meetings/Optical_Design_and_Fabrication
120. Annual Meeting DGaO
Darmstadt, Germany
13–16 June 2019
LASER World of Photonics
Munich, Germany
24–27 June 2019
World of Photonics Congress
European Conferences on Biomedical Optics (ECBO)
Lasers in Manufacturing (LiM)
EOS Optical Technologies
Imaging and Applied Optics (OSA)
Digital Optical Technologies (SPIE)
Optical Metrology (SPIE)
CLEO/EQEC Europe
Munich, Germany
23–27 June 2019
July
OSA Advanced Photonics Congress
29 July–1 August
Burlingame, CA, USA
www.osa.org/en-us/meetings/osa_meetings/advanced_photonics_congress/
September
OSA Laser Congress
Laser Applications Conference
Advanced Solid State Lasers Conference
Vienna, Austria
29 September–3 October 2019
www.osa.org/Meetings/Global_Calendar/Events/Advanced_Solid_State_Lasers_Conference_(1)
October
V2019 – Vakuum & Plasma
Dresden, Germany
8–10 October 2019
Frontiers in Optics: the 103rd OSA Annual Meeting and Exhibit/Laser Science Conference
Washington, DC, USA
13–17 October 2019
www.osa.org/Meetings/Global_Calendar/Events/Frontiers_in_Optics_the_103rd_OSA_Annual_Meeting
SPIE Optifab
Rochester, NY, USA
14–17 October 2019
News from the European Optical Society EOS
New Execom directs the European Optical Society
Within the EOSAM 2018 several changes in the EOS Execom were announced:
President: Humberto Michinel (Spain)
President Elect: Gilles Pauliat (France)
Past President: Paul Urbach (The Netherlands)
Treasurer: Patricia Segonds (France)
Secretary to the Board: Andreas Ettemeyer (Switzerland)
Furthermore, plans were declared that EOS will get a new website by the end of the year. The new domain is scheduled to be published in December 2018.
New EOS Fellows announced during EOSAM 2018
During EOSAm 2018, the EOS Annual General Assembly and the ceremony for the new EOS Fellows were held after the scientific program. The new compositions of the EOS Board and the Executive committee can be found in www.myeos.org.
Six new fellows of the European Optical Society were announced:
Luc Bergé
Trevor Benson
Riad Haidar
Juan Ariel Levenson
Pedro Andrés Bou
Ralf Bergmann
EOSAM 2018 – a Great Success
The EOS Biennial Meeting (EOSAM), a major European event for the European optics and photonics community, was held in the congress center of TU Delft in Delft, The Netherlands, October 8–12, 2018. Over 400 attendees took part in the event and over 350 interesting presentations were held on optics and photonics. EOSAM included a whole week of interesting topics and sessions.
The presidents of EOS partner societies, Jun Tanida (Optical Society of Japan) and Youngjoo Chung (Optical Society of Korea) presented the activities of their societies.
EOSAM 2018 at a glance:
Over 350 presentations on optics and photonics
Over 90 invited speakers
9 Topical Meetings
TOM 1–Silicon Photonics and Guided Wave Optics
TOM 2–Freeform Optics for Illumination, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality
TOM 3–Optical System Design, Tolerancing, and Manufacturing
TOM 4–Biomedical Optics
TOM 5–Metamaterials, Plasmonics and Resonant Nanophotonics
TOM 6–Frontiers in Optical Metrology
TOM 7–Organic & Hybrid Semiconductor Materials and Devices
TOM 8–Adaptive Optics & Information driven optical systems
TOM 9–Optical tapered fibers for light manipulation on the nanoscale
NEW Tutorials on Topical Meeting topics:
Autumn Physics School on Metrology for Thin Film Materials
VirtualLab Fusion Seminar
Grand Challenges of Photonics Session
EU Project result dissemination Session
Industrial Exhibition
Meet & Greet Event for students and companies
Industrial posters highlighting the know-how of the companies
EOS Annual General Assembly 2018
Welcome Reception, Conference Dinner and other social events
Delft is a perfect place to organize such a meeting. The city center is within walking distance of the congress center, and the facilities are modern with professional staff.
More than 400 people attended this year’s EOSAM in this historical city of Delft, which is famous for its blue pottery (‘Delfts blauw’).
The original factory is very close to the congress center, and the EOSAM conference dinner was held there. The open museum and shop contributed to the relaxed and warm atmosphere as people were free to walk around and enjoy good food and drink, and to network simultaneously.
Several student presentations were held during the week. From these very high-quality presentations the award committee had a difficult task to choose the best student oral and poster presentation. These awards, sponsored by Carl Zeiss, went to Anne de Beurs (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) for her talk ‘Diffractive shearing and rotational ptychography for extreme ultraviolet imaging’ and to Kévin Cognée (Institut d’Optique d’Aquitaine) for his poster ‘Substantial improvement of the perturbation for high-Q photonics cavities’. Congratulations to the winners and thank you to the whole committee and especially to the committee chair, Norbert Kerwien, for his work in the selection of the winners.
Organized already for the third time at EOSAM, tutorials dealing with the topics of the TOMs, interested not only students but also other attendees. EOS plans to continue organizing these popular tutorials in future EOSAM events.
In an effort to bring research closer to industry, EOSAM included an industrial exhibition with some 20 exhibiting companies, industrial posters highlighting the know-how of the companies, and a Meet and Greet event organized for students and companies (hosted by TNO).
A special thanks goes to the EOSAM General chairs Paul Urbach (TU Delft) and Stefan Bäumer (TNO), and the whole TU Delft and Aula Congress staff for their support for EOSAM and ensuring a smooth running of the conference. Sincere thanks also go to the TOM Chairs and their committees, and most importantly, to the attendees for making the EOSAM 2018 such a successful event.
EOSAM will be held next in Porto, Portugal in 2020.
©2018 THOSS Media & De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Cover and Frontmatter
- Editorial
- At odds with Nobel
- Community
- News
- Topical Issue: Space Optics
- Editorial
- Space optics
- Research Articles
- The European optical contribution to the James Webb Space Telescope
- The deployable telescope: a cutting-edge solution for high spatial and temporal resolved Earth observation
- Stray light and ghosts in catadioptric spectrometers: incorporating grating scatter measurements into simulations and ghost sensitivity into system design
- Absorbing Aerosol Sensor on Gao-Fen 5B satellite
- A telescope for LISA – the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna
Articles in the same Issue
- Cover and Frontmatter
- Editorial
- At odds with Nobel
- Community
- News
- Topical Issue: Space Optics
- Editorial
- Space optics
- Research Articles
- The European optical contribution to the James Webb Space Telescope
- The deployable telescope: a cutting-edge solution for high spatial and temporal resolved Earth observation
- Stray light and ghosts in catadioptric spectrometers: incorporating grating scatter measurements into simulations and ghost sensitivity into system design
- Absorbing Aerosol Sensor on Gao-Fen 5B satellite
- A telescope for LISA – the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna
